A student’s background characteristics overwhelmingly drive their emotional and cognitive engagement with education rather than school attributes when they are 15 years old.
Published by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER), Do schools influence student engagement in the high school years?, examines whether engagement can be influenced by the way schools are organised and run.
Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), the research explores a range of school characteristics and their impact on students’ emotional and cognitive engagement with school at age 15.
Mr Rod Camm, Managing Director, NCVER, said individual characteristics, such as the intention to complete Year 12, strong academic performance and a high sense of individual ability had a much greater impact on school engagement than school characteristics.
Other important individual predictors that have an impact on school engagement include being foreign born, coming from a high socioeconomic status background, speaking a language other than English at home, working only a few hours a week outside of school, and coming from a traditional nuclear family.
Once individual background factors are controlled for, schools had very little impact on the engagement levels of 15 year-olds.
School characteristics accounted for 4.3% of students’ emotional engagement, and 7.5% of their cognitive engagement. Schools mattered even less for students who were at risk of early school-leaving; school characteristics accounted for 1.4% and 4.4% of emotional and cognitive engagement, respectively.
“The results from this study paint a sobering picture about the ability of school characteristics to raise the engagement levels of 15 year-olds. It seems that by this age the die is cast,” Mr Camm said.
However, Mr Camm said it was premature to conclude that school characteristics had no bearing on student engagement in general. It is quite possible that the real impact of schools on engagement occurs at a younger age.
Copies of Do schools influence student engagement in the high school years?, are available from www.lsay.edu.au/publications/2745.html.
This work has been produced by NCVER through the LSAY program, on behalf of the Australian Government and state and territory governments, with funding provided through the Australian Department of Education.
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