HOESE , W. J.; WEISS, S. L.: The Relationship Between Student Engagement and Student Performance in an Introductory Biology Course that Emphasizes Active Learning

We investigated the relationship between student engagement and performance in college introductory biology. We hypothesized that students who are more actively engaged would perform better than those students who were not actively engaged. We used two measures of student engagement. First, we collected information on student attendance across the semester. Second, we surveyed students about their study habits for the first midterm exam and used their responses to model their level of active engagement. We correlated our measures of engagement with student performance on the first midterm and overall in the course. As predicted, we found that course performance was positively correlated with attendance in interactive lectures both over a single semester and over 5 semesters (n = 150; n = 992, respectively). Using multivariate regression, we found that the relative time that students spent using active study techniques was positively associated with overall course performance, and the relative amount of time spent using passive study techniques was negatively associated with overall course performance. Furthermore, those students who performed worse in the class than predicted by their level of attendance used more passive study techniques than those students who performed better in the class than predicted by their attendance.