Dokumentvorlage für wissenschaftliche Arbeiten

90 Pages·2015·1.32 MB·German

by  Katrin Krause

Thema der Arbeit

Student Engagement in Omani Higher Education

Schriftliche Masterarbeit zur Erlangung des Grades MASTER OF ARTS

im Rahmen des weiterbildenden Studienprogramms Educational Media/Bildung &
Medien an der Universität Duisburg – Essen

von
Katrin Krause

1. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Michael Kerres 2. Gutachter: Dr. Martin Rehm

Muscat, 21. April 2015
Table of Contents II

Table of Contents
Table of Contents .............................................................................................................. II
List of Tables .................................................................................................................. IV
List of Figures .................................................................................................................. V
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1
2 Theoretical Frameworks of Student Engagement ................................................... 4
2.1 What Is Student Engagement? .................................................................. 4
2.2 The Behavioral Perspective ....................................................................... 5
2.2.1 The Origins of Student Engagement Research ........................... 6
2.2.2 The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) ............... 7
2.2.3 Limitations of the Behavioral Perspective .................................. 8
2.3 The Psychological Perspective .................................................................. 9
2.3.1 Student Engagement as a Multidimensional Construct .............. 9
2.3.2 Models of Student Engagement ................................................ 11
2.3.3 Limitations of the Psychological Perspective ........................... 13
2.4 The Socio-Cultural Perspective ............................................................... 14
3 The Context of Student Engagement in Oman ...................................................... 16
3.1 The Chronosystem .................................................................................. 16
3.2 The Macrosystem .................................................................................... 18
3.2.1 Cultural Values ......................................................................... 18
3.2.2 Education .................................................................................. 19
3.2.3 Economic and Social Policy ..................................................... 21
3.3 The Microsystem ..................................................................................... 23
3.3.1 The German University of Technology (GUtech) .................... 23
3.3.2 Family Influence ....................................................................... 23
4 Student Engagement from a Motivational Theories Viewpoint ............................ 25
4.1 Definition of Motivation ......................................................................... 25
4.2 Self-Theories of Motivation .................................................................... 26
4.2.1 Self-Efficacy, Attribution and Control Theories....................... 26
4.2.2 Self-Determination Theory ....................................................... 27
4.3 Achievement-Theories of Motivation ..................................................... 30
4.3.1 Achievement Expectancies and Values .................................... 30
4.3.2 Achievement Goals ................................................................... 31
4.4 Academic Motivation in Gulf Arab Countries ........................................ 33
5 The Proposed Student Engagement Model an Research Questions ...................... 35
6 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 39
6.1 Participants and Procedure ...................................................................... 39
III

6.2 Measures ................................................................................................. 39
6.2.1 Family Support .......................................................................... 40
6.2.2 School Support .......................................................................... 41
6.2.3 University Support .................................................................... 42
6.2.4 Student Motivation Measures ................................................... 43
6.2.5 Student Engagement Measures ................................................. 44
6.3 Statistical Procedures .............................................................................. 46
6.4 Student Engagement at GUtech: Research Goals and Hypotheses ......... 47
7 Results ................................................................................................................... 49
7.1 Validation of the Student Engagement Model ........................................ 49
7.1.1 The Relationships within the Student Engagement Construct .. 49
7.1.2 Four Distinct Dimensions of Student Engagement ................... 50
7.1.3 The Relationship between Motivation and Student
Engagement ............................................................................... 52
7.1.4 Predictors of Motivational Beliefs and Student Engagement ... 53
7.2 Use of Electronic Media in Teaching and Learning ............................... 56
7.3 Covariates of Student Engagement ......................................................... 58
7.4 Summary of Results ................................................................................ 60
8 Discussion ............................................................................................................. 62
8.1 Four Distinct Dimensions of Student Engagement ................................. 62
8.2 The Predictors of Students’ Motivation and Engagement ...................... 64
8.3 The Potential of Electronic Online Media .............................................. 65
8.4 Limitations and Future Research ............................................................ 67
Abstract ........................................................................................................................... 69
Affirmation .................................................................................................................. XXI
Erklärung zur Veröffentlichung ................................................................................... XXI
List of Tables IV

List of Tables
Table 1. The NSSE engagement framework (NSSE 2014) .............................................. 7
Table 2. Questionnaire items to assess family support. .................................................. 40
Table 3. Questionnaire items to assess school support. .................................................. 41
Table 4. Questionnaire items to assess university support. ............................................ 42
Table 5. Questionnaire items to assess university media support. .................................. 43
Table 6. Questionnaire items to assess students' academic self-concept. ....................... 43
Table 7. Questionnaire items to assess students' valuing of academics.......................... 44
Table 8. Questionnaire items to assess students' agentic engagement (original scale)... 44
Table 9. Questionnaire items to assess students' behavioral engagement (original
scale) ...................................................................................................................... 45
Table 10. Questionnaire items to assess students’ cognitive engagement (original
scale) ...................................................................................................................... 45
Table 11. Questionnaire items to assess students’ emotional engagement..................... 46
Table 12. Questionnaire items to assess students’ media engagement ........................... 46
Table 13. Intercorrelations (Spearman’s rho) among and descriptive statistics for the
measures of the student engagement construct. .................................................... 49
Table 14. Factor loadings from an exploratory factor analysis of all 16 items
(presented in short form) of the original student engagement scale. ..................... 50
Table 15. Factor loadings from an exploratory factor analysis of the reduced 14-item
engagement scale. Items redefined. ....................................................................... 51
Table 16. Intercorrelations (Spearman’s rho) among motivational and engagement
variables. Descriptive statistics for the measures of motivation. ......................... 52
Table 17. Intercorrelations (Spearman’s rho) among contextual support and
motivational and engagement variables. Descriptive statistics for the measures
of contextual support. ............................................................................................ 53
Table 18. Simultaneous multiple regression of student engagement on contextual
support. .................................................................................................................. 55
Table 19. Hierarchical multiple regression of student engagement on contextual
support. .................................................................................................................. 56
Table 20. Intercorrelations among media support/engagement, motivation and the
four dimensions of student engagement. Descriptive statistics for media
support/engagement. .............................................................................................. 57
Table 21. Intercorrelations among covariates and measures of motivation and student
engagement. ........................................................................................................... 59
List of Figures V

List of Figures
Figure 1. Qualitative Differences and Dynamics within the Thripartite Engagement
Construct. .............................................................................................................. 11
Figure 2. Conceptual schema for contextual models of student engagement. ............... 12
Figure 3. Conceptual schema for motivational models of student engagement. ............ 12
Figure 4. Conceptual schema for Skinner et al's (1990) motivational model of
perceived control, engagement and achievement. ................................................. 27
Figure 5. General conceptual schema of a self-system process model of motivation
and engagement. .................................................................................................... 30
Figure 6. Conceptual schema of Eccles et al. expectancy-value model of motivation
and engagement. .................................................................................................... 31
Figure 7. Schema of Anderman and Patrick's (2012) conceptualization of the
relations between goal orientations and engagement. ........................................... 32
Figure 8. Student engagement from an integrative psychological and socio-cultural
perspective. ............................................................................................................ 35
Introduction 1

1 Introduction
To enhance achievement, one must first learn how to engage students.
(Newmann 1992, p. 3)

“Research on student engagement leaves big footprints in the tertiary education land-
scape. This is highlighted by the number of articles found by reviewers of engage-
ment research” (Zepke 2013, p. 3). An extensive literature review for the present
study revealed that this holds true for the USA, Australia, UK and New Zealand, but
does not necessarily apply to other countries, and certainly neither to the Sultanate of
Oman where this study was conducted, nor to Germany which has been playing a
keyrole in the set-up of a local private university in the Sultanate.
In 2008, in the sixth issue of “Das Hochschulwesen” and in the context of the ongo-
ing discussion about teaching quality, its measurements and benchmarks, Winteler
and Forster (2008) wrote one of the very few articles on student engagement in Ger-
man higher education. Building on the American approach to student engagement
research and practice, they concluded their article by announcing a first German ver-
sion of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). However, during the
literature research for the present study, the presaged „Fragebogen zum Lern-
Engagement Studierender (LernEStudi)“ (Winteler, Forster 2008, p. 166) could not
be retrieved.
“The need to know more about student engagement for specific student
groups and cultures is a void in the research. Hence, there is an awareness
that the field needs to check the universality of measures of student engage-
ment, and that it is important to undertake studies with a range of students
from different backgrounds, at different achievement levels, as well as cross-
culturally”. (Christenson et al. 2012)
This research aims to contribute to the existing knowledge by delivering insights into
student engagement from the Sultanate of Oman, a country that has not yet been cov-
ered in the related literature, and by exploring some of the particular challenges
German higher education is facing in its endeavors to internationalize and export
education ‘made in Germany’ to the Arab region.
Introduction 2

The setting of the study is the German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech),
where students and staff study and work in the context of vibrant cultural diversity.
The majority of the, mostly Omani, students were previously educated in the Omani
national secondary school system, which has been developed over the last forty years
with only two schools existing in the Sultanate in 1970. The majority of the academic
staff in the Bachelor programs, on the other hand, is of western origin, western
trained. They previously held teaching positions in western universities with mostly
no or little (teaching) experience in Arab countries. GUtech is a private university,
affiliated to RWTH Aachen University, which provides academic curricula, quality
assurance and expertise in setting up the operations of GUtech; the GUtech adminis-
trative staff is mostly Omani.
While there is, before and after Bologna, an on-going debate about the university
readiness of high school graduates in Germany, common doubts whether students are
fit for university are even more prominent in this context of cultural and educational
interfaces at a German university abroad, where Arab adolescents with a more tradi-
tional cultural and educational background struggle to cope with a highly demanding
study program strongly influenced and shaped by German standards of higher educa-
tion. In a previously conducted unpublished survey by the author, the academic staff
of the bachelor programs at GUtech addressed student engagement as a major con-
cern.
Research of some thirty years has produced convincing evidence that engagement is
the key to student success. It predicts attendance, persistence, critical thinking, learn-
ing, test scores, grades, and graduation (Hernandez et al. 2013; Kuh 2003; Skinner et
al. 2008). Since student engagement has been identified as a major contributor to
academic success in general and as a major challenge at GUtech in particular, the
purpose of this study was to better understand the construct of student engagement,
its critical features and predictors. In the academically challenging socio-cultural
context of a German university in the Arab Gulf region, a special focus was on inves-
tigating cultural particularities relating to the relative importance of contextual varia-
bles (Reschly, Christenson 2012).
The paper is organized as follows. Chapter 2 summarizes and reviews the main re-
search directions and conceptualizations of student engagement. Chapter 3 frames
the particular context of this study from an ecological systems theory viewpoint
Introduction 3

pointing to key factors likely to influence students’ motivation and engagement in
Oman. Chapter 4 highlights the close relation between motivation and engagement,
summarizes motivational theories and models relevant to student engagement and
concludes by reviewing research on academic motivation in the Arab Gulf region.
Building on the previous sections, a model of student engagement for the Omani
higher education context and a set of research questions related to the proposed mod-
el are developed (Chapter 5). Chapters 6 and 7 present the methodology, hypotheses,
and results of this study before discussing its theoretical and practical implications
and contributions in the final chapter.
Theoretical Frameworks of Student Engagement 4

2 Theoretical Frameworks of Student Engagement
2.1 What Is Student Engagement?
“Even a casual reading of the extensive literature on student development in
higher education can create confusion and perplexity. One finds not only that
the problems being studied are highly diverse but also that investigators who
claim to be studying the same problem frequently do not look at the same var-
iables or employ the same methodologies. And even when they are investigat-
ing the same variables, different investigators may use completely different
terms to describe and discuss these variables”. (Astin 1999, p. 518)
What Alexander Astin (1999), one of the earliest scholars of student engagement in
higher education, claimed in 1984 still holds true today to the extent that Reschly and
Christenson (2012) refer to the terms of “jingle” (one term for different things) and
“jangle” (different terms for one and the same thing) to describe the conceptual hazi-
ness surrounding the engagement construct in the related school literature.
Looking at some newer definitions of student engagement may well serve to demon-
strate this incongruity. The prevailing perspective in higher education is that of Kuh
(2009b, p. 683): “Student engagement represents the time and effort students devote
to activities that are empirically linked to desired outcomes of college and [emphasis
in original] what institutions do to induce students to participate in these activities“.
There is a rather narrow and clearly behavioral focus to this definition, which, at the
same time, is so broad as to encompass both, the student’s, as well as the institution’s
contribution to high quality learning. While Zepke and Leach (2010) in their review
of 93 research studies, mostly from the USA, Australia, UK and New Zealand1,
acknowledge the role of cognitive investment in and emotional commitment to the
student’s learning in higher education, this multidimensional view of engagement is
much more common for scholars in the school sector, who have taken quite a differ-
ent path:

1 Only eight studies were from other than the above mentioned countries (South Africa, China, Spain,
South Korea, Israel, and France), which reflects the status-quo of research on student engagement
worldwide with the vast majority of studies carried out in the USA, Australia and UK.
Theoretical Frameworks of Student Engagement 5

“Student engagement refers to the student's active participation in academic
and co-curricular or school-related activities, and commitment to educational
goals and learning. Engaged students find learning meaningful, and are in-
vested in their learning and future. It is a multidimensional construct that con-
sists of behavioral […], cognitive, and affective subtypes. Student engage-
ment drives learning; requires energy and effort; is affected by multiple con-
textual influences; and can be achieved for all learners”. (Christenson et al.
2012, pp. 816–817)
Unlike Kuh, Christenson et al. consider what institutions do as contextual influences,
interrelated with but distinct from the engagement construct itself.
Eccles and Wang (2012) in their commentary "So what is student engagement any-
ways?" call for a more precise and targeted definition and conceptualization of en-
gagement than it is the case in most practitioners' and scholars' discussions to date:
narrowing the study focus, clearly distinguishing between precursors, indicators and
outcomes and precisely conceptualizing their respective constructs is of critical im-
portance in order to advance student engagement theory and intervention. The fol-
lowing chapters aim to do so by firstly synthesizing the state-of-the-art of student
engagement research in secondary and tertiary education, before identifying anteced-
ents to student engagement that are of special interest in the Arab Gulf countries,
framing the role of motivation as a mediator between context and engagement, and
finally summing up by establishing a model of student engagement fit for purpose in
the Omani higher education context.
“It is essential to know about the generic ideas offered by the frameworks and
other engagement research. It is even more critical to understand how these
ideas apply to our own context, how they can be adapted to suit our own stu-
dents, teaching philosophies and content area”. (Zepke 2013, p. 5)
2.2 The Behavioral Perspective
Student engagement research can be classified in several ways. The definitional dif-
ferences between approaches in school and higher education have been discussed.
Zepke (2013) notes distinct approaches in the United States (US)/Australasia and the
United Kingdom (UK). Fredricks et al. (2004) as well as Eccles and Wang (2012)