Newsela launched in 2013 with a bold mission: Meaningful classroom learning for every student. Today, our team constantly strives to deliver powerful solutions that inspire our users.
When you stand in front of your classroom and look out at your students, what do you see? Are they looking back and waiting for the next set of instructions? Are they drawing in their notebooks, staring out the window, or fidgeting with something inside their desks?
Even if students are paying attention, they may appear sad, bored, or as if they wish they were doing something else. These students likely aren’t engaged in what they’re learning, which makes it harder for them to intake, remember, and use information.
Today, we’re discussing what student engagement is, what behaviors to look for to know if your students are truly engaged in their learning, and tips to help you make your lessons more accessible to all students.
Student engagement refers to the level of involvement and investment students have in their learning. It’s not just about being present in the classroom and following the rules. It’s the level of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion students show for their education.
Student engagement is the point where thinking and feeling come together. Instead of just absorbing content, students make meaning from it. During engaged learning, students also interact with what they’re learning. It’s not just a passive consumption of information. They’re asking questions, discussing topics outside the lesson, or relating them to content from their own lives or other lessons.
[Why does student engagement matter?](id-why)
If students show up to school and complete the assignments we ask them to, why should we care if they’re engaged in their learning? Engagement in a topic or subject can lead to lifelong interest in learning. It’s not just about getting an “A” on a test or checking something off a to-do list. It’s about actively becoming interested in a topic or subject outside of school.
Here are some benefits of getting your students engaged in content and lessons:
Life skills development: Student engagement boosts motivation, persistence, and curiosity, which are essential life skills for navigating the world outside the classroom.
Positive self-image and behaviors:Engaged students are likely to be more connected not just with their schoolwork, but also with their school environment. These students tend to have a healthier attitude toward school and are more likely to show up and participate than their disengaged peers.
Future success: Higher student engagement in the K-12 classroom is linked to higher occupational status in adulthood. Students who are more engaged in school may be more likely to be employed and stay employed after leaving the classroom.
Better grades and scores: Students who are more engaged with the information in class tend to do better on assignments and assessments, without feeling like they’re putting in too much additional work to see results.
[What does student engagement look like?](id-look)
Having a definition of student engagement is nice, but it’s a bit abstract. How can you tell if your students are making meaning from information or are enthusiastic about what they’re learning?
With younger students, it may be easier to tell, especially if they can’t contain their excitement over a topic. But for middle and high schoolers who may be less open with their thoughts and emotions, how will you know if they’re truly engaged?
Student engagement typically has three components: Affective, behavioral, and cognitive. Here’s what to look for to see if your students are engaged in each of these ways:
Affective engagement
Affective or emotional engagement refers to how students feel and react to learning, the school environment, their peers, and teachers. Emotionally engaged students often appear comfortable in the classroom, ask questions of teachers or lesson leaders, and have positive interactions with their classmates. Without emotional engagement support, learning is less likely to happen.
Here are some key behaviors you can look for to identify emotionally engaged students:
Interest and enthusiasm: Students are excited to learn about a specific topic. You may be able to spot this interest through words (“I love learning about wildlife!”), actions like doing independent reading on a topic, or scores like earning a good grade on an assessment or assignment related to the topic.
Valuing knowledge: Students care that they’re learning and are proud of the skills they’re building. You may be able to tell if your students value knowledge by observing them using skills in new contexts or by discussing what students talk about outside your classroom with parents or other educators.
Positive relationships: Overall, students get along with and respect their peers, teachers, and other educators. This may look like helping others in need, being kind to others, or respecting the teacher and classroom rules or expectations.
Sense of belonging: Emotionally engaged students feel comfortable coming to school each day. They feel safe in their classrooms and secure in sharing thoughts and ideas with others.
Behavioral engagement
Behavioral engagement is the observable actions you can watch your students do as they participate in the learning process. When a student is engaged in their learning, they usually appear to be “on-task” rather than distracted. Here are some key behaviors to look for:
Active participation: Students ask questions, provide thoughts during discussions, and contribute their ideas to individual and group projects and assignments.
Rule following: Students listen to their teachers, aides, or other leaders; follow directions and classroom norms; and avoid creating disruptions or distractions during lessons.
Time management: Students complete in-class and homework assignments on time and pay attention to the tasks while working.
Non-verbal cues: Students make eye contact with the lesson leaders, sit upright at their desks, take notes, and make appropriate facial expressions that show they’re listening to the information being shared.
Persistence and effort: Students continue to work on assignments, assessments, and lessons even when they’re challenging. They ask for help and try new strategies to work through challenges.
Attendance: Students attend school and class regularly and on time, prepared to participate.
Cognitive engagement
Cognitive engagement refers to the amount of brainpower and attention students devote to their learning. When students are cognitively engaged, they’re processing information deeply rather than at a surface level. Here are some key behaviors you can look for to identify cognitively engaged students:
Curiosity: Students ask questions and are interested in learning more about a topic or subject, even if it’s not initially included in the lesson.
Using learning strategies: Students use, or try to use, critical thinking and problem-solving skills to understand information they encounter.
Perseverance: Similar to behavioral engagement, students are willing to keep researching, learning, or practicing even when the material or learning new strategies is challenging.
Making connections: Students make text-to-world, text-to-text, and text-to-self connections during discussions, assignments, and assessments to better understand new concepts and ideas.
Self-monitoring: Students check in on their learning and acknowledge where they’re doing well and where they can improve.
Going above and beyond: Cognitively engaged students use their self-monitoring tools to do more than just what’s required for a lesson or assignment. They want to learn more about a topic, master skills, and demonstrate proficiency for their own satisfaction.
[7 ways to boost student engagement in your classroom](id-tips)
There are techniques and strategies you can use to help students become and stay engaged in the lessons they’re learning. Here are some tips to help you increase engagement for all students to reap the benefits it brings:
1. Build relationships with your students
Think of your favorite teachers from when you were in school, or your favorite teacher characters. What do they all have in common? Chances are, they cared about who their students were as people and outside of the classroom.
Building positive and appropriately personal relationships with your students can help them feel more comfortable coming to school, trying new things, and participating in class. Have frequent discussions with students about non-school-related topics, such as their favorite movies, music, or interests.
Homeroom, after lunch, the end of the day, or holiday and party days are great times for these discussions. You can have them with the whole class, small groups, or one-on-one. Beyond getting to know your students, providing positive feedback, being encouraging, and letting students know it’s okay to try new things and make mistakes are other ways you can build positive relationships with them.
2. Make lessons relevant
Students are most likely to become and stay engaged when they’re invested in the topic. Making lessons relevant is one of the easiest ways to do that. And the good news is, you can make any lesson relevant! Here are some ways you can do it in any subject:
ELA: Read texts and novels that include characters with similar cultural backgrounds, home lives, or interests as your students.
Social studies: Relate U.S. history, world history, and current events to your town, state, or students’ cultures.
Science: Use experiments and demonstrations to show how scientific concepts work in the real world.
Math: Write word problems using students’ names, their interests, or familiar places and events to show how math concepts can relate to their lives.
3. Use active learning strategies
When teaching whole-class lessons or working with students in small groups or one-on-one, model active learning strategies to promote student engagement. Add activities such as group discussions, experiments, or hands-on projects to lessons that help students develop their problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
Move away from 40-minute lectures and break them up with interactive pauses, think-pair-share moments, or short writing activities. You can also try filled classroom models or peer teaching activities that encourage one student or small groups to teach a concept to the rest of the class.
4. Provide actionable, timely feedback
Using frequent, low-stakes formative assessments in the classroom gives opportunities to provide specific, actionable feedback to students. Try a “glows and grows” method, which provides praise for what students are doing well and identifies areas for improvement.
Make sure the feedback is actionable, which can help students understand where and how they can improve. It’s important to keep the feedback timely, too. This helps students make corrections in the moment and keep them from building misguided habits.
When possible, provide feedback in person and use a supportive tone. This also helps you build positive relationships with your students. Ultimately, fostering a classroom culture of perseverance and continuous improvement can make receiving feedback and correcting mistakes more manageable.
5. Build in student choice
Create opportunities for students to make choices about their learning. Encourage them to set their own goals and monitor progress. For example, students may set a goal to read one chapter of a book every night before bed, or read three texts per month independently.
Allowing students to choose topics for projects, how they display their knowledge, or which partners they want to work with for specific assignments also gives them more autonomy in the classroom.
6. Set clear expectations
Set clear classroom and assignment expectations. Make them visible in the room and on worksheets or digital assignments. Using rubrics and passing them out at the beginning of an assignment can help students understand the expectations for specific assignments and self-monitor their performance. Scaffolding lessons and supporting students with their unique learning needs can help them reach these expectations.
7. Use technology effectively
Using technology can help increase student engagement for research, activities, and communication. Tools and platforms like Formative can make lessons and activities both interactive and collaborative, which makes them more engaging.
It’s essential to strike a balance between technology use and face-to-face interactions with peers and teachers. Technology can and should enhance student learning, but shouldn’t replace in-person conversations and group work.
[Student engagement FAQs](id-faq)
Still have questions about student engagement? We have answers!
What factors influence student engagement?
Some students may be more naturally inclined to engage in learning than others. Yet, engaged students can lose that spark, and disengaged students can gain it depending on different factors inside and outside the classroom. Here are just some of the factors that may influence students’ engagement at any grade level:
Teacher-student relationships: Positive teacher-student relationships can accelerate learning and keep students engaged in their work. Guidance, motivation, and timely feedback can strengthen these relationships and also promote student participation in class.
Peer relationships: Students who have friends in the classroom, look forward to group or partner work, and feel comfortable sharing new ideas with peers may be more engaged in their learning.
Learning environment: Students who feel like their school or classroom is a safe place to learn and explore new ideas may be more engaged. Classrooms that provide space for collaboration, communication, and inclusion are typically more engaging learning environments.
Relevance: Students feel more connected to their learning when they see how it relates to their lives outside of school. Content that ties to their culture, city or state, and interests will be more appealing than topics they can’t relate to.
Appropriately challenging tasks: Students are more engaged when their assignments and assessments are appropriately challenging. The work isn’t so easy that they can breeze through it, but it’s also not so hard that even when they employ all their learning strategies and tactics, they still can’t finish it.
Autonomy and choice: Providing students with options for the types of assignments they complete or the topics they can research may increase their engagement.
Feedback and assessment: Providing regular, actionable feedback helps students monitor their learning and find new strategies and ways to improve.
Collaborative learning: Creating opportunities for peer-to-peer work and collaboration helps students learn from each other and increases their motivation and engagement.
Student characteristics: Students with open-minded personalities, a sense of security and belonging, or a preference for collaborative work may become and stay engaged with less prompting than others.
Home life: Students may struggle to stay engaged with schoolwork if they have more pressing events or issues at home. For example, students who have a sick relative, are moving to a new home, or are excited about an upcoming holiday may have a harder time staying focused or engaged on unrelated assignments.
What content and topics keep students most engaged in their learning?
If you’re looking for content to help keep your students engaged, we’ve got you covered. The Newsela research team analyzed over 11 million searches conducted by more than 3.5 million K-12 students across two school years. Their top 50 most popular search terms fell into five categories:
1. Recreational interests and hobbies
Texts about topics that interest students are, no surprise, the most engaging for them. Video games, animals, sports, traditional media, and social media are among the top searches by students on Newsela. Students who enjoy these topics may find the following articles enjoyable:
According to our search data, students love holidays and celebrations. They’re interested in the next date or event on the calendar and how they can get ready for the fun. They may also be interested in learning more about the origins of certain holidays. Students who want to read or learn about annual or seasonal events may be interested in these text sets:
With more access to the internet and social media than previous generations, today’s students are often well-informed about current events in their towns, states, and countries, or around the world. Our search data revealed that current events topics—such as election results, natural disasters, movie releases, and sports championships—are popular among students. Those who like current events may be interested in articles like:
Beyond specific topic coverage, students often look for collections of content types that they enjoy. Poetry, opinion articles, and fiction are among the top-most-searched content types and genres that students want to explore. They may enjoy text sets like:
Students love to laugh or make jokes. According to our search data, silly or sometimes irreverent humor is a big hit with students in K-12. Over 16,000 of them over two school years searched for the term “poop” on Newsela, and found the following articles that they likely enjoyed:
Maximize student engagement with Newsela’s content and resources
With Newsela’s products, you can put relevant, real-world content at the center of skills practice to make literacy outcomes a reality for every learner. Our suite of knowledge and skill-building products, daily instruction and assessment tools, and news and current events options make it easy to maximize engagement while still hitting all your standards and learning goals.
Everything you need to accelerate learning across ELA, social studies, and science
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