This roundtable will focus on two types of quantitative data that measures the engagement of learners in adult literacy classrooms and the ways in which educational roles dramatically affect perceptions of classroom behaviors

Lipnevich, Anastasiya A.

English

Kansas State University

Kansas State University Libraries New Prairie Press Adult Education Research Conference 2007 Conference Proceedings (Halifax, NS, Canada) Divergent Perspectives on Learner Engagement in Adult Literacy Classrooms Anastasiya A. Lipnevich Rutgers University, USA Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/aerc  Part of the Adult and Continuing Education Administration Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License Recommended Citation Lipnevich, Anastasiya A. (2007). "Divergent Perspectives on Learner Engagement in Adult Literacy Classrooms," Adult Education Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2007/roundtables/24 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences at New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Adult Education Research Conference by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact cads@k-state.edu.  1Divergent Perspectives on Learner Engagement in Adult Literacy Classrooms  Thomas Valentine and Judy Milton University of Georgia, USA   Anastasiya A. Lipnevich Rutgers University, USA  Abstract: This roundtable will focus on two types of quantitative data that measures the engagement of learners in adult literacy classrooms and the ways in which educational roles dramatically affect perceptions of classroom behaviors.   Student engagement is recognized as an essential component in the learning process, yet there has been little research about this element in adult literacy classrooms. During a study of learner engagement in adult literacy education, two types of data were collected to capture perceptions of students’ learning engagement. For the first data set, a questionnaire designed to measure self-assessed engagement was administered to 40 students enrolled in adult literacy and adult secondary education classrooms. The questionnaire yielded three distinct scores for each student, each representing a key dimension of learner engagement as listed in Table 1.   *Reverse items  The first dimension, Program Involvement, represents a student’s interest and commitment to the learning program; a high score suggests that students “buy in” to the learning enterprise and see its relevance to their out-of-school lives. The second dimension, Learning Focus, represents the sustained and intentional application of one’s mental energy to the task-at-hand; students who score highly on this dimension indicate that they successfully filter out the  2many distractions that characterize adult literacy classrooms. The third dimension, Independent Effort, is indicative of a students’ willingness to take proactive responsibility for the act of learning; it is characterized by self-directed problem-solving. The second type of data consisted of holistically scored videotaped episodes of classroom behaviors of the same 40 students. Over a three week period, multiple video clips of student behavior were obtained. Each clip was scored by five expert raters (experienced adult literacy teachers who were unfamiliar with the students involved) and assigned a rating between 1 (not engaged) and 4 (highly engaged). Individual ratings were summed to produce a single estimate of student’s learning engagement. Table 2 lists the steps involved in the data collection and analysis.    These four measures (three based on self-assessment and one on expert ratings) all proved to be highly reliable and demonstrated pronounced variance. However, despite our expectations to the contrary, no measure of self-assessed engagement was significantly correlated with the expert ratings based on observation, as shown in Table 3. In plainer terms, the fact that a student reports high (or low) levels of engagement is unrelated to the judgments that teachers make about that student    During the roundtable, we will discuss the methodological and practical implications of this finding. With respect to the former, the findings provide empirical support for two major propositions: (a) even when studying closely aligned phenomena, a person’s position in an adult education enterprise dramatically affects the judgments that are made and (b) the notion that multiple indicators will allow quantitative researchers to arrive at “essential truth” is, in the end, a chimera. With respect to the latter, the need for authentic dialogue between teachers and students about the process (as well as content) of education is underscored.   

Divergent Perspectives on Learner Engagement in Adult Literacy Classrooms

https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2668&amp;context=aerc

Divergent Perspectives on Learner Engagement in Adult Literacy Classrooms

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Kansas State University