Student Engagement and Its Association With Academic Achievement and Subjective Well-Being: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is twofold: (a) to understand how the three key student engagement dimensions (i.e., affective, behavioral, and cognitive) have been conceptualized, operationalized, and measured by researchers in the field and (b) to examine the extent to which the construct, its dimensions, and subtypes are associated with academic achievement and subjective well-being (SWB). Effect sizes and other information (e.g., engagement measures) were retrieved from 137 studies involving 158,510 participants. The systematic review showed that the three engagement dimensions could be further distinguished into seven conceptually distinct engagement subtypes. Metaregression with robust variance estimation revealed that student engagement has a large average correlation with academic achievement (r = .33) and SWB (r = .35). Upon closer inspection, academic achievement has the strongest association with behavioral engagement (r = .39), followed by cognitive (r = .31) and affective (r = .26) engagement. SWB, in contrast, was most closely related to affective engagement (r = .40), followed by cognitive (r = .35) and behavioral (r = .31) engagement. Further analyses indicated that the magnitude of these effect sizes was moderated by the ways affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement were operationalized in the primary studies, as well as other factors like the informant source of engagement and type of achievement measure used. While the present study showed that student engagement was positively associated with desirable student outcomes, it also illustrated how student engagement is, at the current point in time, overgeneralized and in dire need of conceptual refinement.