How can children be engaged in the classroom? And what effect does this have on their learning? When we visited classrooms in Kenya, Ghana, Colombia and Jordan to initially develop the Engage tool, we noticed that teachers – even with the same training, materials, and lesson plans – varied a great deal in how they engaged the children they were teaching. In some classrooms, children were absorbed by the activities – interacting with classmates, thinking critically, and deciding for themselves how to go about a task. In contrast, other classrooms saw children passively absorbing information delivered by the teacher. Our intuition is that the children who were being engaged were also learning more effectively, but is there evidence to demonstrate this?
The Engage tool is strongly related to learning in new study
A new study from the World Bank adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting this is indeed the case. The research took place in classrooms in Peru, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone using the Engage measurement toolkit developed by RTI International and NYU Global TIES with support from the LEGO Foundation. The World Bank research found that support for engagement, as measured by Engage, was highly correlated with learning outcomes. In fact, it was three times more predictive of learning in literacy than the World Bank Teach tool (designed to measure effective teaching practices). Two dimensions of Engage were particularly predictive. Children learned best when they were encouraged to explore materials and examine ideas. They also learned well when the topic of the lesson was connected to children’s personal interests or provided opportunities for social interaction and created a sense of belonging.
Measuring support for engagement
The finding that children learn more when they are engaged may not surprise you, but it speaks to two contributions of the Engage tool. First, we can’t study teacher support for engagement if we can’t measure it. The Engage tool is the first to explicitly measure this construct reliably and with granularity. It examines support for engagement through four different aspects:
- Exploration of objects and ideas
- Personal and social connection
- Giving children agency in their learning, and
- Fostering a positive emotional climate.
The Engage tool also spans childhood, being designed to measure caregiver support for engagement in the 0-2 and 3-5 age groups and as well as teacher support in the 3-5 and 6-12 age groups. It has been developed and tested over five years in 10 countries. We have developed a training approach to prepare assessors to use the tool reliably; data from four countries shows that the four constructs are found – more or less consistently – in each setting. The tool captures something that other tools haven’t, at least not in as much detail. For example, we reevaluated a program in Ghana and found that the Engage tool was more sensitive to the impact of the play-based preschool program than the TIPPS, a tool designed to measure overall classroom quality, originally used to evaluate the program.
Why Engagement Matters
Second, the Engage tool contributes evidence to characterise effective pedagogy in low- and middle-income countries. There have been movements to push traditional ‘chalk and talk’ classrooms to be more learner-centered. Some of those efforst failed because they relied on persuading teachers to adopt unfamiliar instructional practices involving significant changes in behavior. When initially developing Engage, we interacted with parents and teachers and observed classrooms to understand what teachers already do to engage children even in relatively conventional teacher-directed classrooms. We included those existing behaviours in Engage. As a result, the behaviors measured by the Engage tool should be achievable for most teachers. The World Bank study suggests that the behaviors are low frequency – carried out by a minority of teachers in the three countries studied – but high impact.
How to get involved
The Engage collaborative has so far seen the tool used by 13 different organizations. We’d love to see that number grow. With a larger network of collaborators we can further improve the tool and expand the evidence base on engagement in learning. The tools are available to download with a suite of supporting documentation. If you need support or have suggestions, please get in touch at engagetool@rti.org. Our hope is that the data from the Engage tool can guide teachers, inform programs, and advance global understanding of effective teaching.
If you are reading this before our webinar on the Engage tool and the latest findings please consider registering for the webinar:
Introducing Engage – Measuring Adult-Child Interactions that Boost Learning
Tuesday 21 January 2025
2.00 – 3.30pm GMT | 9.00 – 10.30am EST
REGISTER HERE
