Articles Review: Students' Engagement and Involvement in College Education

The Articles That I Read and Those Chosen for Analysis

I read several articles and among them choose to analyze two among them. The first article was titled, Student Involvement: A Developmental Theory for Higher Education by Alexander W. Astin and the other one is Student engagement in college; concept and assessment by Borden, Victor Haifleigh. Both articles major on the level of student engagement and involvement in college education.

Most Meaningful Concepts in The Articles Chosen.

From the first article, the concept of the individualized or eclectic theory was informative. I was impressed by the ideology held by most developmental and learning psychologists who favor eclectic theory. The theory argues that there is no single approach or theory that can be sufficient in for use alone in the field (Astin, 1984). An attempt to use a single approach would result in biased results. As a result, the theory embraces and advocates for curricular content and methods of instruction that are the best fit for an individual student. The theory advocates to borrow the most useful information from other pedagogical approaches to enable the formulation of the intervention plan.

In the second article, the author notes that a student engagement model is based on two components known as the engagement schema and the social context. Engagement schema relates to a students psychological attachment to a college while the social context is corned with the factors in the social setting that have the potential to affect psychological attachment (Haifleigh, 1987). The author described four dimensions of social engagement. I found it impressive that the study used a wide range of data collected from students response in literature. The literature is noted to be mainly negative.

What Are the Strengths and Limitation of Each Article

Some strengths of the articles include the fact that both employ a significant amount of scientific methods. The sources qualify as academic sources as well. It is impressive that uses empirical evidence to assert claims. However, the method used to collect data on student connection with the college may be questionable. The article on student involvement uses developmental theory and profoundly overlooks other theories in the field which makes the findings and practice viable to bias.

Own Questions About Specialization After Reading the Articles

I developed several concerns about specialization. For a start, I question the role of theory in practice today. For instance, theory suggests that student involvement in the college studies is relatively poor. From these findings, several theorists and researchers intervene and conduct research that gives propositions on appropriate methods to change the poor status. However, it is questionable how realistic the findings and theory suggestions are. In the case of student involvement, the theory proposes that a student must invest energy to realize the desired change in learning and development. The theory highlights that simple exposure to information might or might not illicit desired change. It is of interest about the other factors that facilitate change when a student is simply exposed to resources and change is noted.

Learning Expectations After Investing Time in The Course

I am eager to commit my team and resource towards the completion of this course. I am hoping to get sufficient exposure to acquire sufficient and reliable information regarding specialization in to enable future decision making when I am choosing a specialization field.

References

Astin, A. W. (1984). A Developmental Theory for Higher Education. Journal of college student development.

Haifleigh, V. (1987). Student engagement in college; concept and assessment by Borden (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of Massachusetts.