Unraveling Student Engagement: Exploring its Relational and Longitudinal Character

Abstract

Though higher education scholars have long known that undergraduate student engagement is associated with student persistence, they have yet to fully unravel its character and how it evolves over time. We argue that this is in part due to the individualistic, static ways engagement is measured even though scholars recognize it as a fundamentally relational concept. In our theoretical exploration, we draw on existing thinking about engagement in higher education and fit it to a social network paradigm that is well suited to conceptualizing and measuring relational, multidimensional, and dynamic phenomena such as student engagement. We conclude with suggestions for research and practice to further explore the longitudinal character of student engagement and how network analysis may be employed to explore the roles of engagement in persistence.