Relationship between Course Engagement and Educational Application Engagement in the Context of First-year Engineering Students.

This complete research paper emphasizes the importance of students' engagement from two perspectives. These perspectives vary based on students' interaction with learning activities or content and their interaction with the educational applications introduced in the class. This paper examines the relationship between these two engagement perspectives, i.e., students' engineering course engagement (Course_Eng) and students' application engagement (App_Eng) in a mobile technology-mediated learning environment. A CourseMIRROR mobile application was introduced in the first-year engineering (FYE) course, which prompted students to write their reflection on lectures' confusing or interesting points after each class. To collect the data on students' course engagement, we administered a validated survey at the beginning and the end of the semester (pre-post manner). Students self-reported their course engagement on four dimensions of engagement: behavioral, social, cognitive, and emotional. We calculated the number of times students submitted their reflections for the app engagement in a semester. One hundred and twenty students from a required first-year engineering course participated in this study by self-reporting their course engagement and interaction with the application. We hypothesize and explore whether students' course engagement has a relationship with their app engagement or not. We analyzed the data using Pearson product-moment correlation to understand the relationships between pre-course engagement, post-course engagement, and app engagement. Furthermore, we conducted linear regressions to understand the relationship between 1) course and application engagement and 2) changes in students' course engagement and app engagement. The study results indicate that students' pre-behavioral and pre-cognitive engagement significantly correlate with students' app engagement. Also, the study highlights the insignificant relationship of students' social engagement, emotional engagement, and app engagement posts using the application. Further, both students' pre-behavior and pre-cognitive engagement are predictors of students' app engagement, while changes in students' cognitive engagement (from pre to post) also significantly predict students' app engagement. We discuss these results in light of implications, limitations, and future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]