Transitioning from school to university: a person-oriented approach to understanding first-year students’ classroom engagement in higher education

ABSTRACT

The first year at university is critical to students’ later academic development. The first year, however, is also the time when students are most vulnerable to disengagement and dropout. Therefore, identifying students most at risk of disengagement as well as the classroom environment factors that drive or undermine student classroom engagement in the first year plays a crucial role in preventing dropout in later years. This study makes a contribution in this regard by taking a person-oriented approach to discovering profiles of students with different configurations of classroom engagement and examining the classroom factors that determine the classification of students into such profiles. Latent profile analysis of self-report data from 413 first-year university students in Vietnam reveals three profiles of student engagement, namely highly engaged (N = 75), moderately engaged (N = 230), and minimally engaged (N = 108). Multinomial logistic regressions further reveal three classroom environment factors including peer support, provision of choice, and task relevance that predict the likelihood of student membership in the three profiles. The study findings offer useful implications for the development of instructional strategies and the manipulation of classroom environment factors that have potential to promote first-year student engagement in the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• First-year students
• classroom engagement
• higher education
• latent profile analysis

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the students who participated in the study. The author also thanks the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Jane Martin and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Access to anonymised datasets pertaining to this project is available upon request from the author.

Research involving human participants

All procedures performed in the study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

The study involved human participants. They were informed of the purpose of this study and letters of participation consent were completed before the data were collected.