Reported and observed engagement in handwriting and keyboarding activities in elementary school: Are students as engaged as they say they are?

Abstract

Little is known about students’ engagement in school writing tasks and the methods that should be used by the researchers to assess this engagement. This exploratory study examines the relationship between the engagement reported by elementary school students (N = 136) in a handwriting and keyboarding activity (Likert scale questionnaire) and their actual behaviors in such situations. An observational checklist was created to capture engagement behaviors in these writing contexts. Correlational analyses showed that, overall, self-reported engagement scores were positively correlated with the frequency of the behaviors observed in both contexts. The discussion focuses on the relevance of observational checklists and questionnaires for capturing students’ engagement in writing tasks, and opens to the conceptual links between engagement and motivation.

Keywords:

• Writing engagement
• assessment methods
• elementary school

Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the teachers and students who welcomed us into their classroom, as well as to the research assistants who helped with the work connected to this study. We would also like to thank Alison McGain, certified translator, for her careful reading of the article and its translation from French to English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Except for the feeling of belonging.

2 Lei et al. (2018) mentioned the fact that teachers assess two things (students’ engagement and their academic achievement), which can lead to contamination (with the assessment of academic achievement having an effect on the assessment of engagement). Using external reviewers (who do not know the child) could eliminate this potential bias.

3 The majority of studies (75/102) identified by Martins et al. (2022) use only one method to assess engagement.

4 Note that the checklist could also be used for recording new behaviors.

5 At the time this study was conducted, there was no questionnaire assessing writing engagement. However, a self-reported questionnaire is now available (Rogers et al., 2022). The behavioral engagement scale of this instrument comprises four items: one about distraction and three about effort (try hard, work hard and just want to get finished). The five items in our scale reflect the diversity of indicators related to engagement: one item is about starting the task rapidly, one is about concentration (the reverse of distraction), two are about making efforts (do my best, continue even if I encounter problems) and one is about avoidance (try to write as little as possible). The reliability indicators of our scale are similar to the ones of Rogers et al. (2022).

6 This item (Eng 4) entails a negative correlation because a high score on the questionnaire meant that the student was less engaged.

7 The coding of item 4 was inverted to calculate this mean. The results were the same when the mean was calculated without this item.

8 For example, one of the items of the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS) (Midgley et al., 2000), a frequently validated questionnaire used to assess students’ motivation, requires that the respondent consider the perceptions of their teacher, the abilities of their peers and their perception of their own knowledge: “It’s important to me that my teacher doesn’t think that I know less than others in class.”

9 Note that both questionnaires had undergone the necessary validation steps (which is not the case of our questionnaire).

10 The present study did not use videos given that the participants had to be on hand in order for some of the anticipated behaviors to be seen properly and that several students were observed in each class.

11 Only item formulated in the negative