New Conceptual Frameworks for Student Engagement Research,Policy,and Practice

Affective Engagement

Researchers use the term affective/emotional engagement to describe students’ social, emotional, and psychological attachments to school. For ease of analysis, these studies can be classified into two categories. The first kind of research examines students’ affective engagement in relation to their academic pursuits. These studies assess students’ levels of interest, enjoyment, happiness, boredom, and anxiety during academic activity (Ainley, 2012; Appleton et al., 2008; Pekrun & Linnenbrik-Garcia, 2012; Skinner et al., 2008). ¹ A second kind of research takes a broader, institutional view. In these studies, the focus is on students’ feelings of belonging, identification, and relatedness to their school peers, teachers, and the school overall (Daly, Shin, Thakral, Selders, & Vera, 2009; Finn & Rock, 1997; Finn & Voelkl, 1993; Finn & Zimmer, 2012; Goodenow, 1993; Goodenow & Grady, 1993; Osterman, 2000; Van Ryzin, Gravely, & Roseth, 2009; Voelkl, 2012).

Reviews of these two kinds of affective engagement studies yield convergent findings. Above all, research finds that students are not on “automatic pilot” when they are at school. Their feelings and emotional attachments matter. For example, students who are attached to the people at school are more motivated to pursue and complete academic tasks than students who lack similar school attachments (Dornbusch, Erickson, Laird, & Wong, 2001; Smith et al., 2012; Voelkl, 2012). More fundamentally, students without such emotional connections are less engaged, and as they get older, they may experience behavioral challenges, including attendance and disciplinary problems (Finn, 1989; Finn & Zimmer, 2012).

Cognitive Engagement

Studies of students’ cognitive engagement typically focus on students’ psychological investments in academic tasks (Fredericks et al., 2004). Some of this research focuses directly on students’ dispositions toward school work. Examples of these dispositions include the effort students generally exert toward homework (e.g., Birch & Ladd, 1997) and the extent to which they persist when academic work is difficult (Corno, 1993). ²

In contrast to research that examines students’ thoughts about school, other research examines students’ cognitive engagement while they participate in learning tasks. These studies of students’ “in-the-moment” cognitive engagement (i.e., cognitive engagement states) typically describe the ways in which students think deeply about ideas and concepts, how they make meaning of the material presented to them, and how they use self-regulating and metacognitive strategies to master academic content and tasks (e.g., Cleary & Zimmerman, 2012; Corno, 1993; Lam, Wong, Yang, & Liu, 2012; Pekrun & Linnenbrink-Garcia, 2012; Pintrich & De Groot, 1990; Pintrich & Garcia, 1991; Pintrich, Wolters, & Baxter, 2000).

Newman and Wehlage (1993) describe students with high levels of cognitive engagement as exhibiting what they call “authentic achievement.” They suggest that highly engaged and intrinsically motivated students take a particularly disciplined approach toward learning that extends beyond a desire to simply understand class content and/or receive a better grade. Csikszentmihalyi (1999) describes these combined states of emotional and cognitive engagement as indicative of “flow experiences.” When students experience states of flow, they become so intently engaged cognitively and emotionally, they lose awareness of time and space.

Behavioral Engagement

Research on behavioral engagement is particularly broad, reflecting the diverse interests and theoretical perspectives of engagement researchers. For instance, some research on behavioral engagement focuses on student conduct as a key predictor of students’ educational attainment outcomes (Finn & Zimmer, 2012; Griffiths, Liles, Furlong, & Sidhwa, 2012; Rumberger & Rotermund, 2012). Some of these studies examine prosocial conduct indicators, such as the amount of time students spend on homework (Finn & Voelkl, 1993) or the extent to which students comply with school rules (Birch & Ladd, 1997; Finn, Folger, & Cox, 1991).

Other studies, especially those associated with the school drop-out literature, employ measures of student conduct indicative of behavioral disengagement (Rumberger & Rotermund, 2012) or disaffection (Skinner et al., 2008). These measures include individual rates of student absenteeism, suspensions, and class-cutting (Finn et al., 1991; Finn & Rock, 1997; Finn & Zimmer, 2012; M. Johnson, Crosnoe, & Elder, 2001; Rumberger, 2011). In general, studies that employ conduct measures as primary predictors of student outcomes conclude that students with conduct problems are more likely to experience poor educational and social outcomes than students whose behavior better fits the norms and expectations of school (Bowers et al., 2011; Finn & Zimmer, 2012; Henry, Knight, & Thornberry, 2012; Rumberger, 2011; Rumberger & Rotermund, 2012). Of course, any such conduct problems can be connected to behavioral engagement needs, suggesting that behavioral engagement may represent a key mechanism for attenuating the challenges of student disengagement and disaffection (Henry et al., 2012).

Youth-Community Engagement

An identifiable category of behavioral engagement studies extends engagement research outside of school. This research emphasizes out-of-school time (OST) and especially family and community settings for youth development. Unfortunately, there is some conceptual confusion involving school-based and -sponsored after-school programs (e.g., Community Learning Centers), which qualify as school engagement, and non-school organizations, settings, and activities in neighborhoods and communities, including families and extra-school peer groups. Future research will be improved with clearer conceptualizations and more precise specifications of relationships and interactions between school engagement and extra-school engagement.

In our view, studies of extra-school forces and factors can be labeled youth engagement in community settings, abbreviated as youth-community engagement to emphasize that this engagement occurs in extra-school settings and during out-of-school time. These studies examine how the opportunities and resources available to students during out-of-school time influence students’ school experiences and outcomes. Interest resides in the influence of extra-school peer groups, homes, neighborhoods, and community agencies. The effects of OST programs and services on school orientations, experiences, and outcomes is a growing priority (Berliner, 2009; Mahoney, Vandell, Simkins, & Zarrett, 2009; Vandell et al., 2005; Weiss, Little, & Bouffard, 2005).

Although the precise mechanisms for how these extra-school, community-based programs may contribute to students’ school engagement, classroom engagement, and school outcomes are still being investigated, one promising line of research draws on theories of positive youth development. This line of research typically emphasizes and measures six important developmental competencies: competence, confidence, connection, character, caring and compassion, and contribution (Lerner et al., 2005; Roth & Brooks-Gunn, 2003; Theokas et al., 2005).

Generally, this line of research indicates that youth who develop and/or possess the six Cs through OST programs are less likely to develop risk-taking behaviors that may threaten their social-educational development, well-being, and success in school (Catalano, Berglund, Ryan, Lonczak, & Hawkins, 2002). However, researchers also caution that participation in OST programs does not necessarily guarantee the development of the six Cs. In brief, program quality matters (Smith et al., 2012). For example, the literature implicates program participation variables such as the amount of time students participate in OST programs in each day (frequency), staffing quality, affective bonds between young people and adults, and frequency, intensity, and duration of their participation as important linking mechanisms for OST program participation and educational achievement and attainment outcomes (Bohnert, Fredericks, & Randall, 2010; Fredericks, 2012; Gardner, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2008).

All such beneficial relationships in extra-school settings, especially the developmental assets stemming from community youth engagement, need to be conceptually and operationally linked to identical and comparable frameworks for school engagement and academic/classroom engagement. Apparently, there is considerable overlap and complementarity in these three kinds of engagement. Unfortunately, the enormous potential deriving from a synthesis and possible integration of these research-based, theoretically sound perspectives has not been unleashed because the three lines of scholarship have not yet been adequately connected and integrated (Eccles & Wang, 2012). Social-ecological frameworks offer one mechanism for this all-important integration.

Toward Social-Ecological Frameworks

The settings implicated in these three different forms of engagement (classroom/academic, school, and youth-community) span students’ social life worlds. When examined holistically and inclusively, they frame a social-ecological view of student engagement, one that closely mirrors Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) classic, ecological systems framework and today’s social ecological theory (Ungar, 2011).

In this framework, students’ engagement in one ecological sphere of engagement (academic, school, youth-community) is thought to influence—and in some cases may be conditional upon—their engagement in others (Knifsend & Graham, 2012; Lee, 2012; Ream & Rumberger, 2008; Smith et al., 2012; Wylie & Hodgen, 2012). Perhaps above all, this ecological view takes researchers, practitioners, and policymakers outside the school to examine how students’ engagements in external social settings may influence whether and how they engage in particular schools and classrooms at any given point in time. This perspective is especially important for researchers interested in how engagement increases, persists, and declines over time (especially over the course of their educational careers). For example, it may illuminate how students’ initial involvement paves the way for active (i.e., agentic) engagement at school and also how once-engaged students may later merely show up and, in essence, go through the motions (involvement), perhaps on the way to excusing themselves altogether (Rumberger, 2011).

Empirical support for a socio-ecological conception of engagement is available. For instance, where students’ academic engagement is concerned, social-cultural researchers have long demonstrated that across all social and cultural backgrounds, children and youth engage in important literary events in their homes and communities (Heath, 1982; Phelan, Davidson, & Yu, 1998; Polman & Miller, 2010). However, this same research shows that only certain forms of literary practices and events are privileged by contemporary American schools (Heath, 1982; Polman & Miller, 2010). In brief, these social-cultural studies serve as reminders that student engagement in one setting (e.g., home) can greatly influence the range of social-educational experiences and opportunities they enjoy (or not) in others (Barton et al., 2013; Wylie & Hodgen, 2012). Thus, to the extent that research aims to generate theoretically enhanced practice and policy frameworks, engagement research policy and practice will benefit from additional specifications involving the processes and acts of student engagement, including a more precise understanding of its surrounding social-ecological characteristics and influences.

Student Acts of Engagement

Pursuant to the ecological model of engagement advanced in Figure 1, the idea of an act of engagement refers to the various states of experience of individuals as they participate in discrete activities at particular moments in time. These states can range from all-encompassing flow-like experiences (e.g., Bempechat & Shernoff, 2012; Pekrun & Linnebrink-Garcia, 2012) to more passive and/or de-activating states like boredom or disinterest (Pekrun & Linnebrink-Garcia, 2012). Significantly, these states of experience extend beyond students’ emotions. These states also include the indicators of behavioral and cognitive engagement identified earlier in the review (see also, Fredericks & McColskey, 2012).

Notwithstanding the strengths and utility of conventional indicators of engagement, our review suggests that several other indicators of engagement merit more attention, and other researchers agree (Eccles & Wang, 2012; Wentzel, 2012). In the next section, we describe these indicators as representative of the attentional, positional, and social-cultural features of engagement. Our purpose here is to describe and advance their importance, paving the way for a more holistic framework for engagement research, especially research focused on vulnerable student populations.

Benefits and Competencies of Engagement

Consistent with the conceptual model highlighted in Figure 1, research indicates that the quality of experiences students engender from their attentional, positional, and social-cultural engagement influences the benefits they receive (or not) from each engagement-related act. In the research literature, this relationship between student experience and proximal outcomes oftentimes is either blurred or patently tautological. For example, students who engage in particular activities, at particular moments in time, may experience deep senses of social-cultural connection to the activity or the people and places associated with it. In turn, the short-term benefits or outcomes associated with students’ social/interpersonal or place-based engagement may lead to longer term enhancements in students’ social-cultural connections that, over time, may help sustain engagement.

Green et al. (2012) help to characterize such virtuous cycles. These cycles are reflective of what they call “feed forward effects” (p. 1112). These effects may be categorized according to the different indicators of engagement advanced in this review. For instance, enhanced student senses of belonging and relatedness to peers and/or teachers (Horvat & Lewis, 2003; Osterman, 2000), enhanced social competence (Catalano et al., 2002), collective student engagement (Taines, 2012), positive peer group identity formations (Horvat & Lewis, 2003), and collective student efficacy (O’Conner et al., 2011; Polman & Miller, 2010) may be categorized as the social-cultural benefits of engagement. Greater affinity toward engagement activity, including enhanced interest, appreciation, and efficacy toward a particular activity, subject, or discipline, may be categorized as affective benefits of engagement (Kong, Wong, & Lam, 2003; Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, & Shernoff, 2004; Xu, Coats, & Davidson, 2012). And, enhancements in student capacity for self-regulation (Perry, Phillips, & Dowler, 2004; Wolters & Taylor, 2012), volitional control (McCann & Turner, 2004), habits of mind (C. Adelman, 2006), and meta-cognition (Corno, 1993) may be classified as cognitive benefits of engagement.

In addition to social-cultural, cognitive, and affective competencies, studies also document a range of behavioral benefits that stem from student acts of engagement. These behavioral competencies range from the prosocial skills described earlier to enhanced student use of explicit learning tools such as social media, film, and technology (Dockter et al., 2010). The literature also documents how engagement may lead to direct enhancements in students’ “performance” in activity. Here, activity is an inclusive construct encompassing academics (Connell et al., 1994; National Research Council & Institute of Medicine, 2004), the arts (Ramsing & Sibthorp, 2008), athletics (Amorose & Anderson-Butcher, 2007), and others.

Student Engagement Dispositions

The notion of a “student engagement disposition” rests at the nexus of several important social-psychological theories. For our purposes, we consider an engagement disposition to encompass students’ perceptions of the “will” and “skill” they bring to activity (e.g., their social agency). Students’ interests and prior experiences are important to these perceptions, and so are their developing identities, especially their possible selves (Oyersman et al., 2011; Snyder, 2002; Taines, 2012; Yowell, 2000). Thus, an engagement disposition can be considered constitutive of a broader system of social-psychological and social-cultural constructs, including students’ motivations, attachments, past-present identities and experiences, as well as their aspirations for the future (Cleary & Zimmerman, 2012; Crick, 2012; Finn & Zimmer, 2012).

The transactional framework shown in Figure 1 depicts students’ dispositions as drivers for their future engagement experiences (e.g., Dotterer & Lowe, 2011; Henry et al., 2012). However, researchers caution that students’ dispositions should not be considered fixed or deterministic. Because students’ interests and identities may change throughout schooling and adolescence (Eccles & Wang, 2012), researchers often consider students’ dispositions to be malleable. Malleable means that they are amenable to change by intervention (Crick, 2012; Oyersman et al., 2011). “Malleable” also signals that school-desired dispositions are not inherently stable. They may unravel over time, especially when students lack sufficient social supports and resources.

Although students’ dispositions (especially their identity-related aspirations) represent an individual-level construct (e.g., Skinner et al., 2008), their development is thought to be highly influenced by engagement’s surrounding conditions, cultures, and contexts. As indicated by social-cultural theory, students’ lives are influenced by a host of social and cultural forces that require them to co-negotiate and co-construct the social-cultural norms, perceptions, and processes around them (Barron, 2006; Nasir & Saxe, 2003; Ogbu, 1995).

Our review of extant research and theory indicates that different kinds of engagement dispositions may develop from these nested features and interactions. In the following sections, we advance a typology of student engagement dispositions using four social-psychological constructs as primary guides. These constructs are student initiative, student investment, student ambivalence, and student disidentification.

Conditions and Contexts of Engagement

As described in the previous section, the quality and nature of student engagement experiences and dispositions is often highly conditional upon surrounding organizational conditions and ecologies, namely, factors that are external to the student (e.g., Skinner et al., 2008). Because these forces and factors require their own review, we focus here on three particular factors that we believe merit special attention for research on vulnerable student populations. They are population demography, organizational ecology, and social geography (Galster, 2012; Holme & Rangel, 2012; Tate, 2012; Wells et al., 2012). Together they have immediate import to research on student engagement and its undesirable counterpart, student disengagement.

Population demography refers to the characteristics of students and other key actors in the school and surrounding community. Organizational ecology refers to the internal and external environments for schools and school districts, including schools’ relations with other child and family-serving organizations as well as businesses. Social geography refers to the powerful influences and dynamics of place, including the discursive practices associated with places and the identity-bestowing power of place.

In a social-ecological framework, the relations among the three are especially salient, and these relations are ripe with opportunity for engagement researchers, practitioners, and policy advocates. Perhaps above all, together they provide cautions about wholesale generalizability of engagement models and intervention strategies. That is, interactions among population characteristics, school ecologies, and social geography produce important indicators of uniqueness and usher in complex, intervention-improvement contingencies (C. D. Lee, 2012; Wells et al., 2012).

For instance, studies that examine the relationship between the organizational ecology of schools and/or communities and engagement-related outcomes consistently reveal that school and organizational practices matter for engagement (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, & Eaton, 2010; McLeod & Yates, 2006). These factors include, but are not limited to, school size (Conchas & Rodriguez, 2008), opportunities for participation in academic and extracurricular activity (Swanson, 2002), academic press (V. E. Lee & Smith, 1999), as well as classroom-level cultures and practices (Hatt, 2012; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000).

What’s more, as described earlier, research suggests that classroom environments that are autonomy supportive, especially those that promote students’ mastery of classroom content (e.g., mastery goals and expectations), have, on average, enhanced engagement and learning outcomes (Wang & Holcombe, 2010). Theoretically, these engagement-related outcomes are manifest because these environmental conditions tend to facilitate agentic forms of engagement and in so doing, help to foster student initiative (Reeve, 2012). Research also shows that schools that create smaller, more intimate classrooms and learning environments are often more autonomy supportive and tend to be successful in fostering positive school-related dispositions, especially for historically underserved students (Conchas & Rodriguez, 2008; Connell & Wellborn, 1991; Klem & Connell, 2004).

In contrast, researchers have found that schools that create rigid and controlling learning environments are often alienating for students, even across social-class backgrounds (Pope, 2003). Presumably, these conditions lead to suboptimal engagement and learning experiences because they are conducive to the development of passive and compliant-oriented forms of engagement.

For low-income students such rigid and controlling school environments can be particularly isolating and even oppressive, especially when they do not accommodate students’ social-cultural identities or needs for social-cultural relatedness. As research shows, rigid, top-down teaching practices that do not accommodate cultural differences often lead students to experience competing allegiances between peer, school, family, and community priorities and forces. Over time, these competing allegiances may severely constrain student engagement in school, heighten ambivalence, and increase disidentification (Eckert, 1989; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; McLeod & Yates, 2006; Willis, 1977).

In fact, schools that do not connect with and at least accommodate peer, family, and community practices often witness collective student disengagement. More than an individualistic phenomenon, collective disengagement is an organizational variable with socializing power. Its socializing power is manifest when schools with high levels of collective disengagement adversely influence the dispositional engagement of students who might initially view school success as both desirable and attainable (Carter, 2006; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986).

Although the notion of collective student disengagement is widely familiar to social-ecological studies of education, research also suggests that the polar opposite, collective student engagement, represents an important condition for enhancing the school-related dispositions of individual students. For instance, studies show that when school practices are structured to enable students to actively and collectively deconstruct the social forces and factors they view as oppressive and/or alienating, individual and collective student engagement may become more prevalent (O’Conner et al., 2011).

Unfortunately, there are no generalizable formulas for school and district turnarounds vis-à-vis this collective disengagement to engagement phenomenon. For now, research must proceed with a restricted scale, focusing on the often nuanced interplay among population demography, organizational ecology, and social geography.

Conceptualizing Relationships Between Activity and Dispositional Engagement

The development of enhanced socio-ecological frameworks for student engagement must keep the best of past-present research and theory, especially the focus on schools and what happens inside them and because of them. At the same time, future frameworks must be more expansive and attentive to nuanced dynamics. For example, the next generation of cross-sectional engagement research studies should be sensitive to the interplay between students’ activity engagement across settings (e.g., school, youth, and community) and the social-cultural, cognitive, and affective dispositions students derive from their engagement experiences (Appleton et al., 2008; Fredericks et al., 2004).

The initial “measurement model” for a cross-sectional, socio-ecological student engagement research framework should start by depicting and then integrating, at minimum, two central components/dimensions of student experience: (a) students’ activity engagement across settings and (b) student dispositions toward the activities in which they participate, including relevant attentional, positional, and sociocultural indicators. ⁴

To date, the extant research literature has only begun to explore the interplay between students’ activity involvement in multiple settings, especially extra-school settings, and students’ engagement dispositions in school-community life. However, some of the more nascent studies in the adolescent and youth development literatures have advanced an understanding of the relationship between different configurations of students’ activity in multiple settings and educational outcomes (e.g., Bartko & Eccles, 2003; Linver et al., 2009; Peck et al., 2008). Across samples, these studies generally show that: (a) Across activity settings, there are patterned regularities in students’ behavioral engagement, and (b) some activity patterns carry more predictive currency for educational attainment and advancement than others.

For example, Peck et al. (2008) found that students’ activity involvement at home, school, and in the community can be characterized by particular activity patterns or profiles. Specifically, using a sample of 1,350 African American and White youth who participated in the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context study, they conducted cluster analyses that revealed nine distinct profiles of student activity. Of these clusters, five were sports related, two involved student participation (volunteerism and work) in the community but not at school, one involved non–sports-related activity at school, and the final cluster was characterized by students who largely stayed at home, read, and watched large amounts of television.

In the same vein, Linver et al. (2009) conducted cluster analyses on a nationally representative sample of nearly 1,700 students, ages 10 to 18, who participated in the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Their analysis revealed five distinct clusters of student activity at school, home, and community, including (a) a “sports only” cluster, which was defined by high sports participation and lower participation in other activities; (b) a “sports plus” cluster, defined by students who participated in multiple activities including sports; (c) a “school groups” cluster, which included high rates of participation in school activities and lower participation in other activities; (d) a “religious groups” cluster, which participated in faith-based youth groups; and (e) a “low-involved” cluster, which demonstrated low mean levels of participation across all measured activities.

Each of these studies found that students who were involved in sports as well as other school-based activities had better educational outcomes than students who were not involved in school-based extracurricular activities. In particular, Peck et al. (2008) report that youth whose activity patterns were marked by involvement in school clubs, organized sports, and other positive activities (ECAs) had postsecondary enrollment outcomes that were significantly higher than the 56% base rate of their sample population.

In contrast to students who participate in ECAs, students who were engaged either in paid work or were not involved in ECAs had college matriculation rates that were significantly below the sample average. In today’s policy environment, with the premium placed on postsecondary education for human capital development and economic renewal, findings like these have special significance. They illustrate the importance of attending to the person-centered nuances of students’ activity engagement and the ways it may help shape educational outcomes.

Implications for Intervention and Systems Design

Our recommendation for more nuanced, targeted, and population-specific engagement research does not rule out the generalizability of scientific theories or the transferability of universal engagement interventions. However, it does provide just cause for caution because extant theory indicates that engagement is a multifaceted and contingent phenomenon that often varies according to person, context, place, activity, and time (e.g., Eccles & Wang, 2012; Gasper, DeLuca, & Estacion, 2012; Janosz, 2012; C. D. Lee, 2012; Rumberger, 2011; Tate, 2012). In brief, engagement cannot be prepackaged as a neatly defined technical problem (Heifetz, 1994), where the three main challenges are to find the best intervention, implement it with fidelity, and monitor progress for continuous quality improvement, learning, and knowledge generation.

Our review suggests that such an engagement-as-technical-problem-solving approach has limited salience. In fact, our review indicates that engagement can and perhaps should be viewed as an adaptive problem, one without easy and readymade intervention solutions (Heifetz, 1994). For this reason, nuanced intervention research guided by new engagement models and strategies is needed, especially efforts that help practitioners and policymakers better understand what engagement-related policies and practices work, for whom, where, under what circumstances, when, why, and for how long (C. D. Lee, 2012).

Granting the enduring importance of research framed by specialized disciplinary perspectives and conducted by a limited number of researchers, our review invites, indeed necessitates, interdisciplinary research designed and conducted by teams. These teams are needed because expansive engagement designs will be difficult for individual researchers to implement. But, when armed with sufficient resources, teams will be able to generate path-breaking knowledge of the relations between and among various engagement ecologies/settings, together with frameworks and specifications for new ecologically driven interventions (e.g., Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011).

To realize this potential, researchers will need to take better stock of the temporal elements of student engagement, together with how it may vary as a function of particular student subpopulations. As detailed throughout the review, the ways that students’ engagement can vary over time, both within and across grade levels and schools, provides important reminders for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. To begin with, all forms of engagement are developmental projects, and engagement is both an indicator of, and a driver for, whole child development. In the same vein, schools as organizations are vital developmental contexts for healthy children and adolescents (Eccles & Roeser, 2011), not the only one, but surely one of the most important because educators’ engagement-related successes and shortcomings have short- and long-term impacts on students’ school success. Schoolwide (organizational) engagement interventions thus merit additional exploration, especially ones guided by an engagement-oriented conception of school climate.

At the same time, our review indicates that educators’ and schools’ ability to exert positive influence and control over students’ engagement-related dispositions, cognition, emotion, behavior, and motivation may be constrained by two inescapable realities. Young people spend most of their time in out-of-school contexts. And, family, peer, and neighborhood ecologies, like schools, are powerful developmental contexts for children. The immediate implication: Place-based intervention research is needed, including designs that attend to school characteristics, population features, place-based influences, and their interactions (Wells et al., 2012).

The overall direction for research and development can be readily summarized. When these extra-school influences are harmonized with their school-related counterparts, as they may often be with more economically advantaged students and their families, engagement may be more readily facilitated (Eccles et al., 1993; Eccles & Roeser, 2011). When they are not, as is often the case with the most vulnerable people in the most challenging places, engagement is at least constrained and often prevented (Ream & Rumberger, 2008; Wylie & Hodgen, 2012). Here, then, is a rationale for the socio-ecological framework for engagement research, one that invites researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to become more person-centered, peer group–centered, school/organization-centered, and place-based (e.g., Shinn & Yoshikawa, 2008).

Several other research and development implications follow, and they have special import for the most vulnerable students and the schools that serve them. Because of space constraints, a few important examples must suffice. A companion analysis provides other new research and development directions (H. A. Lawson, 2012).

The dominant model for school improvement is the first example. It can be characterized as walled in, building centered, school day focused, and controlled almost entirely by educators (H. A. Lawson, 2010b). This design limits educators’ engagement-related reach into students’ external, social ecologies; impedes access to external, engagement-related social supports and resources; restricts and even prevents collaboration with community health, social service, youth development, and private sector leaders and professionals; contributes to the isolation of teachers, principals, and entire schools; and sacrifices opportunities for comprehensive, coordinated whole child development. Students with urgent developmental needs and/or “noncognitive barriers” to learning readiness (Farrington et al., 2012) have the most to lose with these walled-in improvement models, and schools with significant subpopulations of these students continue to struggle.

Improvement models characterized as partnership models (e.g., H. A. Lawson, in press), community collaboration models (e.g., Anderson-Butcher et al., 2010), multiservice and extended service schools (Dyson & Todd, 2010), and community schools (H. A. Lawson, 2010a) provide alternatives to the dominant improvement model and offer promising opportunities for engagement research, intervention design, policy, and practice. To realize this promise, engagement will need to become an explicit improvement priority. Presently it is not, in part because their improvement discourses tend to focus on health and social services to needy students or perhaps sharing decision-making power and authority with parents, young people, and other local residents (Lawson, 2010a). In our view, these current models might be expanded from the current focus on removing barriers to engagement and learning (e.g., H. Adelman & Taylor, 2005), or more narrowly, preventing disengagement (Rumberger & Rotermund, 2012), to a more robust targeting of those social-organizational conditions known to facilitate student engagement over time and across activities, people, places, and settings. Such a long view of engagement is especially critical in today’s race-to-the-top environment, one in which students must be engaged longer and more deeply.

Student support teams consisting of school-based pupil support professionals and more expansive ones involving community-based health and social service providers stand as prime examples of potential organizational facilitators. These student support teams can use engagement, disaffection, and even the “re-engagement” of once-engaged students as centerpieces in their interprofessional collaborations (H. A. Lawson, 2012). They can help bridge longstanding divides between enhanced learning readiness programs, fundamental priorities such as school attendance and homework completion, and teaching-learning processes (especially teachers’ orientations and behavior). Perhaps above all, when engagement and engagement-related priorities are the centerpieces of interprofessional teamwork, engagement-related responsibilities and accountabilities are not placed squarely and exclusively on the shoulders of classroom teachers. Shared responsibility and accountability for students’ academic outcomes follow suit, extending outside the school’s walls, prioritizing students’ OST, and utilizing peer, family, and community resources for student success.

Youth-community engagement in out-of-school time activities carries particular import for extended school-community improvement, especially those “extended, expanded, accelerated, and connected” strategies that impact the core technology of schools while also developing a comprehensive system of learning supports in the community. Here, Heath’s (2012) depiction of science learning under the expert guidance of practicing scientists is particularly instructive. In her work, guided apprenticeship models of instruction (see also, Rogoff, 2003) help facilitate powerful learning because the conditions for collective and agentic engagement are optimized in these extra-school settings. For example, young people shed their roles as students and enact the role of practicing scientists. As a result, they enjoy the kind of curiosity-creating, visual-spatial, and mistake-driven learning experienced by “real world” practitioners (see also, Anderman & Patrick, 2012; Assor, 2012; Brooks et al., 2012). Because student learning is both project- and place-based in these apprenticeship models, students also learn the relationship between science and civic engagement, connecting students to the range of engagement features and settings depicted throughout this review.

Finally, cradle-to-career system building offers manifold opportunities for new engagement frameworks and interventions—with the reminder that postsecondary education completion with advanced competence hinges on active, consistent, and persistent engagement. Here, the big questions offered at the beginning of this review must be revisited. How will three subpopulations of students—those who drop out, those who do not complete high school on time, and those who finish only high school—gain readiness, develop needed commitments, and expand their competence so that they are able to complete postsecondary education? How will they become engaged? Who will help sustain their engagement (Fall & Roberts, 2012)?

These questions are especially salient to the ethnically diverse, low-income students who attend schools and live in neighborhoods where multiple, co-occurring outcome disparities are apparent (Sampson, 2012; Wilson, 2011). To wit: When individuals and entire subpopulations conclude that school and educational pathways and privileges are not open to them—namely, “college is not for people like me”—social exclusion is implicated (H. A. Lawson, 2009), and it carries with it profound implications for student engagement, institutional disidentifaction, and dropout (Oyersman et al., 2011; Rumberger & Rotermund, 2012; Tinto, 1994). The upshot is that perceived social exclusion is an intervention priority, especially in today’s race-to-the-top policy climate. Active, consistent, and persistent engagement is not likely to eventuate until it is addressed, and progress will not be made in relation to the drop-out epidemic until such time as it is targeted, starting in the 1,500 schools dubbed “drop-out factories” (Balfantz & Byrnes, 2012).

Such is the manifest need for engagement-focused systems interventions. Specifically, cradle-to-career systems development—with its emphasis on educational, occupational, and economic opportunity pathways and structures—represents a vertically directed, systems-level approach that, when properly synchronized with existing family and community resources, can combat social exclusion and other barriers to institutional engagement and identification. One key is whether students perceive these pathways as facilitative of their preferred identities and/or futures (e.g., Oyersman et al., 2011). The other key is a horizontally configured improvement framework that enables educators and their partners to better utilize students’ external (non-school) ecologies for positive learning and development. To the extent this happens, cradle-to-career systems interventions may serve to enhance the engagement of the most vulnerable students.

In conclusion, our expansive, social-ecological engagement framework highlights needs for a new generation of engagement-focused research, practice, and policy innovations because it emphasizes powerful peer, family, and community influences outside of school. At the same time, it indicates that even the most gifted and talented teachers, working in relative isolation, may not be able to engage the growing number of vulnerable students alone. All school improvement models with their respective teaching and learning strategies thus stand to benefit from such a social-ecological conception of student engagement, including its implications for interventions aimed at harmonizing and synchronizing extra-school engagement forces and factors. America’s success in race-to-the-top may depend fundamentally on this more expansive agenda for engagement research, policy, and practice. If our review contributes to this agenda and facilitates improvements in engagement research, policy, and practice, it has achieved its primary purpose.