Engagement with School in Students with Special Educational Needs

Student’ engagement with school is a strong predictor of both positive and negative academic trajectories indicators. 

As a consequence, it is been acknowledged in recent years as a phenomenon of great importance for the understanding of academic trajectories. Low school engagement is a strong risk factor for maladaptive outcomes, from poor academic performance and school dropout, to disruptive and anti-social behaviors.

School engagement refers to the students’ level of involvement, connectedness bonding and commitment to school as well as motivation to learn and to achieve. 

It is an indicator of the quality of effort devoted by students to educationally purposeful activities in order to achieve desired outcomes.

School engagement is a multidimensional construct including contextual, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components, but a consensus about the number and the type of dimensions is still to be achieved. However, a common feature of the several frameworks to students’ engagement is the notion that engagement is a psychosocial process, resulting from the interaction between individual and contextual factors.
Students’ engagement with school is an interactive process, with interactionist perspectives conceptualizing engagement as a result of the degree to which school meet students psychological needs. In order to reach their full potential, students need that context offer the necessary conditions so that their psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness and competence are met. As it is posit by several frameworks, individual characteristics interact with contextual dimensions in the shaping of psychological states, such as subjective experiences towards school.

Students with SEN can experience negative developmental outcomes on several domains, including motor and cognitive dimensions, language and communication, difficulties on behavior and emotional control and social skills or learning disabilities.

These characteristics constraint learning processes, they influence several types of outcomes, and therefore exert a substantial influence on trajectories of school engagement, and ultimately they lead to developmental paths associated to dropout. 

School context imposes demands and challenges in: 

- Behavior (e.g. to follow rules; to wait for its turn) 

- Academic tasks (e.g. understanding new concepts, problem solving)

- Social interactions (e.g. group entry and belonging and conflicts)

They require emotional and behavior self-regulation. 

SEN frequently have additional difficulties on these dimensions which place them at increased risk for poor school outcomes. Students with disabilities experience restrictions to participation in school activities, and experience lower levels of wellbeing. Namely, students with SEN who receive educational services in inclusive classrooms are more likely to show chronic disengagement, specifically in tasks requiring independent work. This is due to difficulties such as diverse cognitive abilities, multiple and varied instructional needs, academic performance bellow (or above, if gifted) their same-age peer group, cooperation, assertion and self-control levels above the national normative levels, in contrast with high scores for externalizing behavior problems, hyperactivity and inattention, combined with the provision of largely undifferentiated instruction.

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Although there are several frameworks to students’ engagement with school, there is a consensus that engagement encompasses two basic features: individual and contextual characteristics. Therefore, we adopted the framework of Appleton, Christenson, Kim, & Reschly (2006) for describing school engagement in students with and without SEN. These authors developed the Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) which captures to major dimensions: Cognitive and Psychological engagement.

This study will contribute to an integrative understanding of students engagement with school, allowing for direct comparisons between groups of students.

To describe the cognitive and contextual dimensions of school engagement in students with and without Special Educational Needs. In this study we tested the hypotheses that students with and without SEN needs would differ in terms of individual and contextual dimensions of engagement with school.

Source: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=56041784004