Unravelling the influences of student engagement on their mathematics achievement in secondary schools : an international study

Abstract

Nowadays, student engagement and mathematics achievement are regarded as two critical components in educational and research fields. When linking these two unique components together, a special relationship is generated, which creates multiple benefits to numerous stakeholders, especially for students, so the student engagement-mathematics achievement relationship has received increased attention from different stakeholders worldwide in recent decades. Nevertheless, our current understanding of this relationship tends to be narrow and shallow due to the existence of knowledge gaps and research limitations in literature and studies, respectively. Thereby, it offered an inevitable opportunity for me to conduct this investigation and write this dissertation to further explore and explain the relationship between these two concepts. The whole dissertation includes two analytic parts. Part One consists of two literature reviews. The general review inspects the attributes got involved in the student engagement–mathematics achievement relationship, while the critical review makes known the peculiarity of this relationship. An integrative model was constructed to wholly explain such relationship. Part Two includes three empirical studies that examine the influences of main effects (Study I), interactive effects (Study II), and contextual effects (Study III) on such relationship, respectively. Specific statistical techniques, such as hierarchical linear method (HLM), independent t-test, plausible values, and multiple imputation, were utilized to analyse the sample of 294,516 secondary school students at the age between 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months from 34 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, all of whom had accomplished the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2012. In this dissertation, several notable findings are reported. First, the results of Study I reveal significant positive main effects existed in students’ affective, behavioural, and cognitive engagement associated with higher levels of mathematics achievement. Second, the results of Study I illustrate the influences of cognitive engagement were significant stronger than the other two norms, in terms of main effects under the student engagement-mathematics achievement relationship. Third, the results of Study II demonstrate significant positive interactive effects existed on particular (but not all) pairwise of student engagement associated with higher levels of mathematics achievement. Fourth, the results of Study II illustrate the joint influences associated with affective and cognitive components were superior, while the influence of behavioural component was least on other engagement components, to higher levels of mathematics achievement. Fifth, when comparing the results of Study I and Study II, the results illustrate that students who were highly engaged in any two norms of engagement performed much better in mathematics achievement than those highly engaged in only a single norm of engagement. Sixth, the results of Study III reveal that the student engagement-mathematics achievement relationship was significantly and simultaneously moderated by contextual factors at the student and school levels, but not at the country level. Last, the results of Study III illustrate the impacts of contextual factors engagement interactions at the student, school, and country levels were much stronger with a cognitive component. This dissertation, as a valid reference, makes theoretical, pedagogical, practical, and empirical contributions in educational and research fields. Nevertheless, potential limitations and defects still can be found in certain areas of this investigation; thus, further empirical studies are needed to validate new findings.