Getting engaged is more complicated than it is (?)

Inside Higher Ed reporting on a session at the recent AAC&U annual meeting. Selected quotes:

The unsurprising fact that students are very different from one another, and the slightly less expected reality that any individual student can be significantly more or less engaged at various points in his or her academic career, suggest the need for a far more nuanced understanding of the "student engagement" theory of learning than has sometimes been the case....

Summing up findings from a research effort that has a primary goal of showing how individualized and ever-changing student "engagement" is predictably challenging, as the researchers were quick to note. But one of their primary (preliminary) recommendations is that precisely because engagement is dynamic rather than static, college officials trying to measure the impact of engagement on student performance should consider changing the unit of measurement from overall grade point average to performance in an academic term, or even a single course.

The study suggests a "complex," and unclear, relationship between engagement and student grades, the researchers say. "Some students need to achieve a certain level of grades before they feel engaged...while for other students, there appeared to be little or no connection between how enmeshed they felt in their work and their grades in those courses.

And now, for the rest of the story...