Promoting Academic Success through Student Engagement

Abstract

A common theme in this issue is school engagement, which is particularly timely given the recent emphasis on this construct in the educational literature. School engagement has become an appealing mechanism to address steep declines in academic motivation and achievement across grade levels (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Fredricks & Eccles, 2002). Fredricks et al. (2004) stated that school engagement is highly malleable and "the study of engagement … as an interaction between the individual and the environment promises to help us to better understand the complexity of children's experiences in school and to design more specifically targeted and nuanced interventions" (p. 61). Fredricks et al. suggested school engagement is a multifaceted construct that includes the subcategories of behavioral engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. Behavioral engagement includes participation in academic and social or extracurricular activities and is correlated with positive academic outcomes and low rates of...