Engagement, academic achievement and written composition

Abstract

Engagement can be considered as a crucial factor in maintaining student participation in their own learning, mainly in demanding areas such as written composition. It is this way that the relationship between engagement and academic achievement has been broadly documented, although the case of writing has been less studied. This study intended to investigate if engagement is related to academic achievement and written composition. Through a correlational study, 213 ninth-graders answered to the Questionnaire on Students Engagement in School, which includes behavioral, affective, cognitive, and agentic dimensions. The same students wrote an argumentative text that was evaluated from the point of view of its global quality and structure. Data related to students’ grades in different subject areas and students’ retentions were also collected. By establishing correlations, it was observed that engagement is associated with academic achievement and also with writing, but only with global quality of writing. It was also found that the different dimensions of engagement were unequally related to academic achievement and writing, being particularly noticeable the absence of an association with agentic dimension. Conclusion was the existence of a relationship between engagement and academic achievement and writing, some of the main limitations of the study were indicated as well as lines of future research that would help understand some of the results found.