Method to study student engagement uniformity in a classroom

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for analyzing student engagement uniformity in classrooms, validated through comparison of two semesters with different teaching methods, revealing significant engagement improvements among initially less engaged students.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach to measure engagement uniformity and demonstrates its effectiveness through empirical validation in real classroom settings.

Findings

Engagement of initially less engaged students improved significantly.

Engagement levels of initially more engaged students remained stable.

The method effectively captures changes in student engagement over a semester.

Abstract

We present a method to study engagement level uniformity in a class of students. We validate our method by comparing two semesters taught using different methods in a physics and mathematics course. The first semester used conventional methods while the second semester used graphic spreadsheets-based laboratories and homework before the introduction of formal methods. We found that engagement of the students that were below the median at the beginning of the semester improved by an order of magnitude (by our metric) while the engagement level of students initially above the median did not change.