Teachers’ estimates of their students’ motivation and engagement: being in synch with students

Abstract

Being aware of, monitoring and responding constructively to students’ signals of motivation and to students’ signals of engagement represent two important teaching skills. We hypothesised, however, that teachers would better estimate their students’ engagement than they would estimate their students’ motivation. To test this hypothesis, Korean high-school teachers rated three aspects of motivation and four aspects of engagement for each student in their class, while students completed questionnaires to provide referent self-reports of these same aspects of their motivation and engagement. Multi-level analyses showed that, after statistically controlling for the potentially confounding information of student achievement, teachers’ engagement estimates corresponded significantly to their students’ self-reports while their motivation estimate did not. These findings validate teachers’ skill in inferring their students’ classroom engagement and lead to the recommendation that teachers monitor classroom engagement to be in synch with their students during instruction.

Keywords:

• motivation
• engagement
• teachers

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the WCU (World Class University) Programme funded by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, consigned to the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (Grant no. R32-2008-000-20023-0).

Notes

1. Potentially, four levels are actually represented in each teacher rating: the individual student level; the classroom level; the teacher level; and the school level. We could not analyse the data at either the classroom or school levels, however, as five of the six schools had only one representative teacher and five of the eight teachers taught only a single class. These low representations (n = 1) for the majority of the schools and the number of classrooms per teacher made analyses at the classroom and school levels not possible. For the main interest of this study, we analysed the data only considering the individual student and teacher levels.

2. In addition to the HLM analyses we report in Tables 3 and 4, we conducted further HLM analyses that included student gender and student grade level as additional predictor variables. Adding student demographic variables to the HLM analyses did not affect the magnitude of the coefficients (for student self-report and for student achievement) reported in Tables 3 and 4, except for small variations. Adding the two statistical controls also did not affect any of the significance levels (except that the effect on behavioural engagement was increased from B = .21, p = .052 to B = .22, p < .05).