Collective Engagement in the Classroom: Results From a Literature Review Project

The UCG Research Seminar series is dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary discussions and sharing innovative research within our faculty. On 25 January 2024 our colleague Naomi de Ruiter will present her research on collective engagement in the classroom.

An abstract for the talk is as follows:

Student engagement is critical for effective education. While most research in the educational sciences concerns ‘individual engagement’, there is little consensus regarding what ‘collective engagement’ is and how it can be supported in the classroom. As a collective, a class can be engaged, restless, or bored. The quality of collective engagement is more than the sum of engagement of all individual students, and is constantly changing.

In 2020, Naomi de Ruiter (UCG), Mayra Mascareno (Educational Sciences), and Elisa Kupers (Pedagogy) received a grant from the NRO (Netherlands Initiative for Education Research) to conduct a two-year project in which we aimed to analyze and integrate existing research on collective engagement in the secondary-school classroom with a literature review. With our literature review, we addressed three research questions. The first concerned how collective engagement is defined and how it is operationalized in existing empirical literature. The second question aimed to understand the mechanisms involved in the emergence of, and changes in, collective engagement. With the third question, we aimed to synthesize what is known about the teacher's role in regulating collective engagement processes. The results of the project were presented in August 2023 at the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction in Greece, and Naomi will share the results with the UCG community during the research seminar. Those interested can also read the NRO report (in Dutch).