Disengagement, engagement and digital skills in technology-enhanced learning

Abstract

With the digitalisation of education increasing, the relationship between student engagement in Technology-enhanced Learning (TEL) and digital skills has remained largely unexplored. There is a strong consensus that engagement is necessary for students to succeed in school. We hypothesised that students reporting high and low levels of general engagement display differences in terms of their engagement in TEL, and that students' digital skills correlate with their engagement in and disengagement in TEL, which in turn is related to their learning outcomes. We used statistical tests to explore the relationship between the students' (N = 410) general engagement and engagement in TEL, and investigated how digital skills were related to engagement and disengagement in TEL. We found significant correlations between students' digital skills and engagement in TEL, showing that the possession of high levels of digital skill is related to engagement in TEL. Interestingly, digital skills were not related to disengagement. This suggests that students reporting both high and low levels of digital skills disengage to some extent when learning with technologies. We also identified variables reflecting both engagement and disengagement in TEL that predict student performance as measured via final grades, implying that in order to understand and support students who learn with technologies, a broader understanding of the factors influencing engagement and disengagement is key.

Digital literacies in higher education

“…Based on the need to digitalize the university context (Milenkova & Manov, 2019;Koumachi, 2019;Bergdahl et al, 2020), and in light of national and international guidelines regarding both the intention to modernize education and guarantee that students have conditions to access digital technologies, as well as the capacity for critical use and civic participation in online environments, this article provides a report on a study aiming to: identify perceptions of higher education students regarding the digital skills they possess, in addition to the uses and possible effects that students attribute to digital literacy, in the development of personal, social and lifelong learning skills. These objectives were guided by the following research questions:…”

Innovating Pathology Learning via Kahoot! Game-based Tool: A Quantitative Study of Students’ Perceptions and Academic Performance

“…Studies have suggested that today's students tend to stay more engaged in the educational activities with technology involved. [17,18] Pathology as a basic medical science linking academic knowledge to clinical cases has always been considered challenging, as students are required to understand, interpret, apply, evaluate, problem solve and memorize a large sum of information about the human body.…”

Student engagement and disengagement in TEL – The role of gaming, gender and non-native students

“…Research on gamers' engagement in learning has been inconsistent. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that gaming in class is related to lower grades (Bergdahl et al 2019b). While Bergdahl (ibid.).…”

“…Furthermore, students often get frustrated with teachers' low skills, tolerance or inclusion of technologies (Gikas and Grant 2013). While researchers have started to approach both engagement and disengagement (Balwant 2018;Bergdahl et al 2019b;Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2014), there has been a call for more nuanced studies that approach differences of engagement between groups of students (Fredricks et al 2018;Hietajärvi et al 2019). As it is well known that disengagement may escalate into school dropout (Finn 1989;Wang and Fredricks 2014), schools could identify early signs of disengagement and use preventive measures to curb future absenteeism.…”