Engaging Students Through Creative Classroom Design

Abstract

Student engagement is generally talked about as institution-level engagement, or individual-level engagement. We were interested in engagement on the individual level, wanting to know what happens in the classroom. Individual-level student engagement is a complex construct and can refer to many concepts, which can be grouped according to researchers have recent frameworks into Behavioural, Emotional (Psychosocial), and Cognitive aspects (Fredricks et al., 2004; Kuh 2009). Our study asked: What is the contribution of the learning environment (i.e., classroom) to student engagement? We compared students in a traditional classroom (n = 12) to students in an active learning classroom (n = 15), with both classes being taught by the same instructor (JN). We implemented a novel survey instrument encompassing behavioural, emotional (psychosocial), and cognitive aspects.