ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1649744
Reconceptualizing Learning Engagement: Evidence for a Context-Sensitive Structure in STEM Education
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, United States
- 2Cornell University, Ithaca, United States
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Understanding student engagement as a psychological construct remains a persistent challenge in educational psychology, particularly in higher education STEM contexts. Traditional models distinguish engagement into behavioral, cognitive, and affective dimensions, yet often overlook how the structure of engagement may be shaped by contextualized learning activities. This study introduces and tests a novel, activity space-based model of engagement, hypothesizing that behavioral and cognitive engagement are organized by the specific academic environments in which they occur (e.g., lectures, exams, projects, recitations). Applying new engagement survey instruments that were iteratively developed to be contextually meaningful, we first present an exploratory factor analysis applied to 1,176 students from two different courses and institutions. Then we present a confirmatory factor analysis applied to 772 students in a third course. We find that a model organized by activity contexts—rather than by behavioral and cognitive distinctions—better fits the data and generalizes across STEM disciplines. The findings challenge conventional engagement theory and support a reconceptualization of engagement as a partially context-sensitive construct. This theoretical shift has implications for psychological models of learning and for the design of more precise, equitable interventions that address varied patterns of engagement within and across STEM domains.
Keywords: engagement, Learning, STEM - Science Technology Engineering Mathematics, ABC model, higher education, Factor Structure, Measurement, Disengagement
Received: 18 Jun 2025; Accepted: 22 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 McChesney, Schunn, Dorve-Lewis, Godwin and DeAngelo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Eric Trevor McChesney, erm216@pitt.edu
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