Sources of variability in middle and high school students’ emotional engagement

The importance of students’ engagement for upper elementary, middle, and high school students has received great attention in recent years, in part because it is widely recognized as a mechanism by which students achieve success in school. Examples of success-oriented outcomes include, but are not limited to, greater academic performance, completion of high school, and life satisfaction. Both individual-level and group-level factors are discussed as contributing factors to students’ levels of engagement in school. However, the present body of literature offers a range of mixed findings about student engagement which, in part, may be due to variable definitions and operationalizations of student engagement.

This thesis uses data from the Gallup Student Poll of over 330,000 students in grades 6 through 12 from 716 U.S. public schools across all U.S. census regions to find that grade level is a stronger predictor of students’ emotional engagement with school than gender and race/ethnicity. Results from this thesis also provide evidence that predicting students’ emotional engagement requires more information about students and schools than is commonly available for researchers to use. In other words, student’s emotional engagement with school cannot be accurately gauged simply by only their demographic characteristics (i.e., grade level, gender, and race/ethnicity) or the characteristics of the school they attend (i.e., cohort sizes, free or reduced lunch rate, and student-teacher ratio). This is not to say that the school a student attends does not matter for students’ emotional engagement, however, the sources of variability in students’ emotional engagement are far more complex than simply which demographic group they belong to or the general characteristics of their school.