A Person-Centered Approach to Students' Evaluations of Perceived Fear Appeals and Their Association With Engagement

ABSTRACT

A person-centered approach was employed to investigate how students' evaluation of perceived teacher utility value messages, i.e., fear appeals, as a threat and as a challenge, combined within individuals and how these combinations related to student engagement. Two studies were conducted with students in their final two years of secondary education. Empirically distinct clusters emerged at two time points in the academic year. Evaluating the message in the fear appeal at a higher level of challenge than threat was beneficial. Unexpectedly, high threat was associated with high engagement, as long as high challenge was also present, however, this combination was also related to high emotional disaffection. Moderate threat combined with moderate challenge had the most detrimental relationship with student engagement. Educational interventions should aim to increase the likelihood of a challenge evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Challenge evaluation
• cluster analysis
• fear appeals
• student engagement
• threat evaluation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Hannah Wilkinson (Liverpool John Moores University), for her help with data entry and management, and Lars-Erik Malmberg (University of Oxford) for the suggestion of including previous examination performance as a predictor of cluster membership.

Endnotes

Notes

1 In England, the GCSE program of study is taken over the final two years of secondary education (Years 10 and 11) and leads to school exit examinations.

2 Cluster analysis conducted on the Time 1 data collected from only those participants who remained in the study at Time 2 produced the same results as those of the full sample, indicating that any differences between time points were not due to attrition.

3 Although the emotional disaffection subscale of the Engagement Versus Disaffection With Learning Questionnaire, developed by Skinner, Kindermann, and Furrer (2009), consisted of 12 items, five items were selected based on their face validity to reduce the burden on student participants.