The influence of student-teacher interactions on students' engagement

The influence of student-teacher interactions on students' engagement

• Lee, Tai Sang

2006

• S School Environment & Facilities, Organization
  • SH School Culture, Teacher-Student Relations
• F Learning & Teaching
  • FH Classroom Communication

Curricula Teaching

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Primary Education

In the recent years, students' engagement has been the focus of concern in the US. Various studies have found that students' academic performances were directly affected by students' engagement. In Hong Kong, research on this topic has not yet been found. This research aimed to find out how the behaviors of three primary school English teachers' affect their students' engagements. The teachers were observed on how they presented their lessons on one of the units of the textbooks. Each teacher chose three students as samples of this research. Ways of data collection included: lesson observation, video-taping of classroom teaching, in-class tape-recording of the sample students, and interviewing the teachers and sample students.
The findings of this research perceived the following six behaviors that were of vital importance to students' engagement: (1) Providing learning opportunities for students, (2) Roles of teachers, (3) Student-teacher dialogue, (4) Teachers' demand on students' understanding of what they have been taught, (5) Teachers' self-reflection while teaching, and (6) Teachers' expectations on students.
There are three aspects of engagements: affective engagement, behavioral engagement and cognitive engagement. Students display different levels of engagements due to their teachers' behaviors while teaching. This research found that students' behavioral engagement is associated with superficial affective engagement but does not necessarily correlate with cognitive engagement. On the other hand, cognitive engagement is closely associated with profound affective engagement. It was also found that students' engagement is influenced by the following psychological factors: (1) autonomy, competence and relatedness of the Self Determination Theory, (2) self-efficacy, and (3) students' learning goal orientation. In order to elevate students' engagement, teachers have to provide learning opportunities at a suitable level of difficulties for the students and at the same time, challenging and exciting. Teachers should let students to have enough autonomy when they are striving hard for success. If students exert effort to reach their goals, they can get the sense of self-efficacy.
During the classroom teachings, teachers performed multiple roles. This include guided participation and scaffolding which helped to facilitate students in learning. During teaching, teachers should have continuous self-reflection and make suitable adjustment based on students' immediate responses so that they can always learn at the Zone of Proximal Development.
This research also discovered that students' learning goal orientation is very complicated. It is not a dichotomy. In the process of learning, students should go through the process of internalization, which is the most essential indicator of cognitive engagement. The researcher noticed that three of the teachers' behaviors may generate students' pseudo-learning: (1) teachers' didactic approach, (2) I-R-E (Initiation-Response-Evaluation) approach, (3) teachers' low expectation on students. Thereof, dispositional factors may not be the reason for students' lack of motivation in learning. Learning motivation may be the outgrowth of teachers' behavior while teaching.

EdD

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: A, page: 0859

• English

Dissertation Theses

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/c1b486cf

2010-12-16