دانلود رایگان مقاله تعامل مدرسه، استفاده از فناوری اطلاعات و توسعه آموزش

Abstract

This study focuses on three objectives. First, it investigates distinctive profiles of adolescents based on combinations of their levels of behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement with school. Second, it examines whether adolescents' educational development outcomes (GPA) and extent of use of utilitarian (school-oriented) and hedonic (social media and videogames) information technologies (IT) vary as a function of their school engagement profiles. Third, it probes the mediation effects of adolescents' extent of use of utilitarian and hedonic IT on the relation between the different school engagement dimensions and educational development outcomes. The sample (n = 6885) was drawn from a large nationally representative dataset that is part of a series of annual surveys of American adolescents. Latent profile analysis identified five distinctive profiles of adolescents based on the combinations of their levels of three school engagement dimensions. The results of ANCOVA analyses indicated that these profiles differ in the use of utilitarian and hedonic IT as well as GPAs. Moreover, results of structural equation modeling showed that while the extent of use of hedonic IT partially mediated the effect of school engagement dimensions on GPA, the extent of use of utilitarian IT did not. Considering the importance of adolescents' school engagement for their development and the essential role of IT in adolescents’ lives, our findings make important contributions to the literature and shed light on promising avenues for future research.

4. Discussion and conclusions

This study contributes to research in education and developmental psychology by addressing three important research questions. The first research question focused on school engagement as a multidimensional construct and inquired about the distinctive and meaningful clusters of adolescents based on the combinations of different levels of behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement with school. Our findings lent support to the existence of distinctive profiles of adolescents, based on combinations of different levels of behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement with school. Specifically, five profiles of engagement with school were identified: Highly Disengaged, Moderately Disengaged, Emotionally & Cognitively Disengaged, Moderately Engaged, and Highly Engaged. These profiles differed in terms of their extent of utilitarian and hedonic IT use as well as GPA. Consistent with M.-T. Wang and Peck (2013), our findings illustrate that heterogeneity among adolescents in terms of engagement with school and its consequences can be more meaningfully explained based on multidimensional school engagement profiles, rather than through using a single composite school engagement score (Jimerson et al., 2003). The clusters we identified were largely consistent with M.-T. Wang and Peck (2013)’s findings. This study therefore adds to the thus far very limited body of works on distinctive school engagement profiles. Future studies can examine the stability of the clusters identified. Furthermore, using larger samples sizes can result a more nuanced distinction of school engagement profiles. For example, our large sample size (n ¼ 6885) as compared to M.-T. Wang and Peck (2013)’s sample size (n ¼ 1025) resulted in more nuanced partitioning of the “Moderately Engaged” cluster into two clusters: “Moderately Disengaged” and “Moderately Engaged”. Such differences in our findings as compared to M.-T. Wang and Peck (2013)’s, as well as the possibility of having new, more nuanced clusters that can better explain adolescents’ heterogeneity in terms of school engagement dimensions are important avenues for future research