What Is Student Engagement?
Student engagement is a way to describe the extent to which students are involved in their education. It goes beyond simply attending class, or even doing well in class. Student engagement is about a student's desire to learn and succeed, and it is about how students connect with the material they are learning.
Student engagement can be measured by looking at grades, participation in class discussions, or something as simple as asking students how engaged they feel in their education.
Why Is Student Engagement Important?
Student engagement is important because it is a measure of how much students are learning and what they are getting out of the class.
When a student is engaged, they are more likely to apply their knowledge in the future. They will be more likely to remember the material from your class than if they were not engaged in learning.
Engagement also improves retention, which means that students will remember the material better over time. A student who is engaged will also be more likely to participate in discussions, which can help them learn even more!
What Can Cause Low Student Engagement?
There are many things that can cause a student to become disengaged in the classroom, including:
- Lack of sleep
- Feeling sick or having an illness
- Not being fed before school
- Stress at home from family problems or conflict with other children in the home/family
- Lack of motivation and drive to learn (this can be caused by a lack of interest in the subject matter, boredom, or disinterest)
How Do I Increase Student Engagement in My Classroom?
As a teacher, you want your students to be engaged with what you are teaching. You want them to come to class and feel like they are learning something that is interesting and valuable to them. If a student is bored or disengaged, it is more likely that he or she will fall behind, fail classes, and eventually drop out of school.
How do you make sure your students are engaged in class? Here are some tips:
- Make sure the content is relevant and applicable to them. If they cannot see how it applies to their lives, they will not be interested in learning it.
- Use visuals (like graphs or charts) whenever possible — visuals help students retain information better than text alone does.
- Keep the lesson short and sweet — students have short attention spans! Do not go over the allotted time for your lesson plan unless it is absolutely necessary; instead, try breaking up lessons into multiple parts per day so that each part does not take too long to complete (and so you do not lose their attention).
