I too have been troubled by what people define as student engagement - even from the PER community. After teaching for 20+ years, I have come to the conclusion that in many ways what a teacher asks students to do - whether it is listen to a lecture or do an active-engagement exercise/experiment or a create their own lab and analyze it - they will learn nothing if their mind and heart are not engaged.
As long as you have students who do whatever a teacher asks them to do for no other reason than to get a grade then you will not have any learning occur at all. Oh yes, they may make the grade. But most of them will forget most of what they have been taught in less than a year.
They key to learning anything is to want to learn it. Nobody can make you learn it if you don't want to learn! And nobody can stop you from learning if you want to learn!
I believe that if administrators, teachers, students and parents would accept this reality, we would see a tremendous improvement in student performance as measured by the understanding and retention of knowledge and the development of skill.
Mark Mars
________________________________
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu on behalf of scitch@verizon.net
Sent: Fri 04-Dec-09 01:39
To: phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
Cc: phys-l@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu
Subject: [Phys-l] Student engagement
In a conversation at work recently, I came to realize that everyone defines "student engagement" differently. I was in a group where "engagement" meant "students are busy." What they are busy doing was unimportant. When I explained that it means something totally different in science, they had never heard of such a thing. Then when I said that there are mountains of PER showing that the type of engagement that we scientists are speaking of is far more effective than lecture (no matter how "engaging" the lecturer thinks his/her lectures are) the conversation really got heated.
So, we ended up in a debate about the effectiveness of lecture. I have heard anecdotes on this list several times about experiments involving asking students simple questions after a lecture and they were not able to even tell what the lecture was about. I could not find references to any such experiment online. Have these results been described somewhat scientifically anywhere?