Why Compliance Matters More Than Engagement
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why student compliance and effort may tell us more about learning than visible engagement.
Key Takeaways
- Compliance Can Support Learning - If students are doing worthwhile work you’ve assigned, their compliance may be a positive sign that learning is happening.
- Engagement Is Hard to Interpret - Students who look interested or are having fun are not necessarily learning more than students doing difficult, less enjoyable work.
- Effort Matters Most - Real learning requires students to expend effort, try hard, and persist through challenging tasks.
- Surface Appearances Can Mislead - A bored or serious expression during hard work may still reflect deep thinking and substantial learning.
- Recalibrate Walkthrough Look-Fors - Focus less on whether learning looks fun and more on whether students are productively doing meaningful work.
Full Transcript
I think compliance is actually better than engagement when it comes to student learning. See, compliance gets a bad rap, but the thing about compliance is if a student is doing what you ask them to do, and you've designed a learning activity that's worthwhile, that is likely to produce learning, well, then that compliance is a good sign that the student is learning,
and then, of course, we can assess whether the student actually learned. Engagement is a much more slippery concept, right? Engagement often is a proxy for fun, right? Does it look like the student is having fun? Does it look like the student is doing something I would want to do?
Does it look like the student is enjoying this activity? Well, that has nothing to do with learning, right? Learning is often hard work. It does not look like fun to be solving difficult math problems, right? You might be frowning, you might look intellectually engaged, or you might look bored, right? Sometimes hard work is boring, and yet it still results in a lot of learning.
So I think we've overweighted on this idea of engagement, and we've overestimated how much we can infer that learning is taking place from the surface appearances of engagement. And I think instead what we need to be looking at is, are students doing their work? Are they really trying? Are they putting forth effort? Because only by putting forth effort can students learn, right? Students can't just sit there and have fun and learn by osmosis.
They have to be expending effort in order to learn. So I think we need to recalibrate what we're looking for a little bit and shift away from Let me know what you think.
