User:Emmawarren21/sandbox

This is my sandbox page. I can use it to play around with wiki markup, make practice edits, and get started writing an article. It's a safe place where my work won't get deleted before I figure out how things work.

Factors Influencing Student Engagement
When looking at a particular student’s engagement in a learning activity, it is important to think about how and why the student is engaging the way they are. There are many different factors that contribute to a student’s engagement, ranging from the student’s internal experiences to the student’s interactions with their environment.

Internal Factors
Studies have concluded that there are three main factors that contribute to the student’s internal process of engaging, the first of which being behavioral engagement. Behavioral engagement defines how the student appears to be engaging with learning, such as participating and persevering. The second internal factor is cognitive engagement, which concerns the student’s mental processes of paying attention and pushing themselves past their expectations. The last factor deals with the student’s positive or negative experience of learning, and is called emotional-affective engagement. These internal engagement factors are not stable, and can shift over time or change as the student moves in and out of the school environment, classroom environment, and different learning tasks.

External Factors
There are a vast amount of external factors that influence a child’s experience with engaging in learning, such as the family, school, peers, sociocultural factors, and environmental stressors.

Family. Family shapes a child’s experience with learning and engaging through the home environment, the family’s values, and the family’s access to opportunities. Parenting styles and the parents’ expectations for the child’s success influence how much parents are involved with their child’s learning, which studies have shown to be positively connected to student engagement. A family’s income also has an effect on a child’s engagement, because families with a higher socioeconomic status (SES) have been shown to expose their children to more intellectually enriching activities and know how to intervene in the school system to promote their child’s education.

School. There are numerous ways in which school influences student engagement, including structural characteristics like class size and interactional processes like teacher’s instructional and emotional support. Studies have shown that instructional quality, such as rigorous and challenging learning activities that can be applied to the outside world, as well as teacher expectations can enhance or hurt a child’s engagement. The school environment is also important to student engagement, as one study reported that racial discrimination in schools negatively affected students of color's engagement and performance. .

Peers. Peers have a strong influence on adolescent engagement, with research showing that adolescents will match their engagement level to that of their peer group, and conversely choose a peer group that matches their own engagement level. During this time, peers are an important part of a student’s self-identity, with a strong connection to a peer group relating to higher levels of engagement. Peers also influence younger children as they learn to navigate how to socialize and socially conform.

Sociocultural Factors. A student’s social identity (i.e. race-ethnicity and social class) contributes heavily to a child’s engagement. Social positions influence access to resources and opportunities, exposure to stressors, and parental investment. It is vital to consider sociocultural factors when observing the engagement behavior of youths of color, because they experience intergenerational oppression, discrimination, and socioeconomic inequality.

Environmental Stressors. Environmental stressors, predicted by both race-ethnicity and SES, play a large role in student engagement. Children from poor or low socioeconomic households may experience a disruption in family functioning due to economic hardships and financial strains, and children from low SES neighborhoods and communities of color (specifically Native American, Black, and Latinx) experience more stressors due to their surroundings. Neighborhoods closely mirror the resources given to the schools in the area, and schools in low SES areas are underfunded and lack supplies, leading to an inequality gap in the education these children receive.

Environmental stressors also include the prejudice, racism, and discrimination a student of color is subject to. A child’s race determines the stereotypes they will face in and out of school, and research has shown that perceptions of discrimination and stereotype threat play a large role in the development of engagement amongst children of color.

Intersection of External Factors. The factors mentioned above do not occur in isolation to one another - they are interconnected and shape student engagement. For example, research has shown a connection between school systems and race-ethnicity in that Black male students and Latinx male students are suspended at a rate far higher than their white male peers. Observing the intersection between the factors (and the privileges and oppression inherent in each factor), help to create a deeper understanding of an individual student's engagement.

Emma, all I can say is WOW! Great job with this draft. I want to start out by saying that this was an incredibly written draft. You put a lot of work into this and it shows. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your work and learned a lot just by peer-editing. Great job going in depth about both the internal and external factors that influence a child's engagement in the classroom. I was going to suggest going deeper into the external factors when I read the first sentence of that section, and then you blew me away as I kept reading. I love how you added so many examples and used words like, "such as". This is important because you made the article easy to understand for anyone that will go on Wikipedia to read this. I wanted to provide constructive feedback in some way that would be helpful to you but I don't know what else to say except that this is a very well-written, well-cited draft. In my opinion, this is ready to be published to Wiki.

The only thing that I would say is that this information may need to come from one article that we were assigned. I'm not totally sure if that's a rule or not (Dr. Tran would definitely know a lot more than I would) but if I remember correctly, we may only be citing one article. If I'm wrong, then that's great and I don't think that you should change a thing. But I just wanted to put that out there just in case this is a requirement for the project! Great job again, you're a superstar. I tried to edit your citations to make sure that they were italicized in the correct places, but I think that this may be the way that Wikipedia publishes them. It wouldn't let me edit them but if I could, I would have just fixed the italicizing of the journal name but this is probably just the way that Wiki formats it.

Being bold is important on Wikipedia!