Dynamics of School Engagement and its Relationship with Development of Conscious Self-regulation in Adolescents

Abstract

The phenomenon of school engagement, considered as a stable, directed and active participation of students in educational activities and in the school life in general, is of considerable interest to researchers in the field of educational psychology. According to modern scientific concepts, engagement can be assessed through behavioral, cognitive, emotional and social manifestations. The research had its purpose to study the dynamics of school engagement in adolescents, as well as to reveal the relationship of conscious self-regulation with behavioral and cognitive components of engagement based on the longitudinal data obtained on the sample of 6-8 grade students (N=80). A separate task was to find an answer to the question of whether the conscious self-regulation can be considered as a significant predictor of changes in the behavioral and cognitive engagement of students during their study in the secondary school. Methods: "Multidimensional Scale of School Engagement"(Wang et al., 2019; Fomina, Morosanova, 2020); "The Self-Regulation Profile of Learning Activity Questionnaire — SRPLAQ" (Morosanova, Bondarenko, 2017). Statistical processing of longitudinal data (including the latent growth curve modeling) made it possible to reveal the negative dynamics of the students’ behavioral and cognitive engagement during their study in the secondary school. The data analysis allowed to describe the effects of relationship between behavioral and cognitive engagement: a higher level of cognitive engagement contributes to a less pronounced decrease in behavioral engagement. The study established positive correlations of conscious self-regulation with both cognitive and behavioral engagement. The decrease in engagement is less pronounced in adolescents with a higher level of development of conscious self-regulation.