Giving Compass' Take:

• Linda Jacobson explains how North Dakota is measuring student engagement as an indicator of school success to fulfill an ESSA requirement.

• Should other states be using this indicator? How can state level learnings from ESSA be acted upon accross the country? 

• Find out how states can maximize the benefits of ESSA. 

When officials in the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction were deciding on which nonacademic indicator to include in their accountability plan to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), they decided to take a different direction than most states.

While most states are tracking chronic absenteeism rates to measure student success, North Dakota decided instead to monitor student engagement using a survey developed by AdvancED.

At one time, student engagement — one element of school climate — was largely thought to be whether students were paying attention in class, author and researcher Robert Marzano said in an interview.

But now educators recognize that it encompasses a variety of behaviors that demonstrate students’ interest in what they are doing in school and whether they feel it has any relevance to their lives. A 2015 report from the Brookings Institution described student engagement as “the intensity with which students apply themselves to learning in school.”

According to an AdvancED definition, students are engaged when they show commitment to learning in the classroom as well as out of school. “They willingly put forward the required effort to find a level of personal success academically, socially and emotionally,” they write.

Analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Markowitz finds that No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) emphasis on standardized testing and holding schools accountable for hitting student proficiency targets may have at first increased students' engagement in school in contrast to what many predicted. But over time, she found that engagement declined and that there was a negative relationship between NCLB and student engagement.

Read the full article about student engagement by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.