Socio-academic predictors of the Study Engagement in engineering first year students

Abstract

Although Study Engagement has been linked to different key variables for the teaching-learning process in higher education, there is a lack of clarity regarding the factors that affect it, especially in engineering education. The research objective was to evaluate the predictive capacity of academic goals, the sense of belonging and peer support on Study Engagement. A cross-sectional associative-predictive design is carried out that incorporates the measurement of these variables in 743 first-year engineering students. The strongest predictors were learning goals and career membership versus other goals and support. The weight of each variable was different for each dimension of the Engagement. With this, the results contribute to understanding differences in the predictors of Engagement, which encourages potential differentiated interventions depending on the dimension that needs to be stimulated.