Many educators will have observed a familiar trend every term: a classroom which was full in the first week becomes noticeably emptier by the last, and initial enthusiasm cools as the semester progresses. Though most studies assume that student disengagement negatively impacts the student experience and learning, we have been unable to find any which track engagement or disengagement over time for each student and link it to student attainment.

To investigate this, we monitor the responses to classroom polls in a series of 6 workshops of a large first year undergraduate finance course with over 1000 students. We ask students at the start of the workshop whether, and to what extent, they have prepared for the workshop. We also use in-class quizzes as a formative assessment tool, asking all students one quantitative and one qualitative question each workshop. We link this to a pre-course demographic questionnaire and to final exam mark.

Though intuitively familiar, the concept of student engagement has been given a great many definitions, ranging from the emotional and organisational to the cognitive and behavioural. For the present purposes, we analyse the behavioural aspect, of participation in learning activities, motivated by the constructivist view that students’ construction of their own knowledge is at the heart of education.

We find:
1. A decline in student participation in in-class quizzes between the first and last three workshops strongly predicts a decline in the final exam score, even when controlling for student age, gender, geographical origin, language status, and whether they have been the first in their family to attend university. The negative association is, however, significantly diminished for students from Eastern Europe, but is unaffected by student age, gender, or language status.
2. A decline in students’ degree of preparation for workshops, between the first and last three workshops, significantly predicts a decline in their final exam score. However, this is subsumed by the inclusion of students’ gender, geographical origin, and language status, showing that disengagement in preparation over the course of the semester is difficult to disentangle from demographic origins; we discuss this link in a spearate conference submission.
3. The decline in student participation in in-class quizzes holds greater predictive power than the decline in students’ degree of preparation for workshops, in predicting final exam score, showing that the efforts should be directed to preventing the former where possible.

Measurement of student engagement in universities has been previously measured either by general surveys of the campus and the institution as a whole, for instance, the US National Survey of Student Engagement and the Australian First Year Experience Questionnaire, or by surveys representing a snapshot during single lecture, and close observation of a limited subset of students, e.g., the ‘Behavioural Engagement Related to Instruction’ survey. We contribute to the literature by tracking different forms of disengagement over the life of the course, and showing their relative impact on student attainment on the final exam for the first time.

Keywords: Student disengagement, Pre-class Preparation, Formative assessment, Technology in the classroom.