Abstract:

Interest is rapidly growing in providing social-emotional learning supports to students at all education levels to enhance academic achievement. A related area of growing attention is the measurement and diagnosis of student’s engagement with school. There is growing awareness that we can use science to improve education by assessing non-cognitive motivators (or facilitators) of academic outcomes (Christenson, Reschly & Wylie, 2013; Khine and Areepattamannil, 2016). These often not easily detectable affective motivators include a student‘s sense of self-confidence, resilience and belonging.

Two camps have emerged on measuring student engagement; one focused on measuring engagement at the cohort level, and the other exploring measuring engagement at the individual student level. Our research concentrates on the latter approach. In the past decade research on student’s social-emotional connectivity to school has demonstrated how schools can reengage the disengaged student as a strategic support for enhanced achievement and equal educational opportunity (Christenson, Reschly & Wylie, 2013). Previous work has described the development of the Student Orientation to School Questionnaire (SOS-Q) as well as the construct and predictive validity of the SOS-Q (Burger, Nadirova & Keefer, 2012 ).

Our most recent research, to be reported here, has analysed the relationship between student engagement and concurrent achievement in Grade 9 Mathematics. Working closely with school staff, we investigated past achievement data from multiple sources to assess the predictive power of both earlier standardized test data as well as teacher assigned marks for 106 Grade 9 students attending high school in an intermediate size suburban school jurisdiction in Alberta, Canada. The students concurrent SOS-Q data was also analysed via multiple linear regression to determine if their pattern of engagement with school can illuminate optimal pedagogical support strategies for improving Mathematics achievement.

Our findings indicate that Grade 8 teacher marks had the strongest predictive validity relative to Grade 9 Mathematics results, and supporting student’s External Resilience or their sense of ability to handle the external challenges presented by Mathematics learning point to optimal strategies for supporting students. Lastly, we discuss some of the issues associated with getting accurate data from emerging Student Information Systems.

Keywords:

Student affect and achievement, accurate predictors of student achievement.