Exploring Approaches to Measuring Student Engagement Across Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Contexts

IntroductionSupporting meaningful student engagement is an important goal of educators and educational researchers. However, there are many variations in definitions and measures of engagement, making it challenging to recognize and design for deep engagement. To address this challenge, the purpose of this work is to interrogate the ways that different theoretical and methodological choices impact how we describe student engagement. MethodologyWe applied two student engagement coding schemes to classroom video from two computer- supported collaborative learning (CSCL) contexts. We compare how each coding scheme made different types of engagement more or less visible and explore potential decision points and synergies.FindingsThe coding schemes differed in many ways, including their theoretical grounding, level of analysis, and inclusion of various dimensions of engagement. We argue that each of these methodological choices orient researchers to video data differently, which has implications for how researchers make sense of group work, next analytical steps, and claims. There are also substantial challenges that researchers may encounter when using engagement coding schemes outside of the contexts in which they were developed, including achieving reliability and the relevance of indicators of engagement to the novel context.DiscussionThis study contributes to our understanding of how to make sense of engagement in classroom video and the synergies between different coding choices and theoretical perspectives.