Fact: bored students don’t learn. I doubt you’re blown away by this but in case you need some reassuring, a new study from the University of Pittsburgh, coauthored by the University of Michigan looked at student engagement, and the key to helping students stay focused in the classroom.

Researchers found that there is a link between student perception of their school environment and their behavior. Just like their peers influencing their general attitudes, students are impressionable and their ideas about their environment can change their disposition. “When we talk about student engagement, we tend to talk only about student behavior,” Ming-Te Wang, assistant professor of psychology in education in the School of Education and of psychology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at Pitt, said in a statement. “But my coauthor and I feel like that doesn’t tell us the whole story. Emotion and cognition are also very important.”

According to researchers, this work could be used to create a diagnostic tool-used by educators to better recognize disengagement as well as strategies for improvement “Enhancing student engagement has been identified as the key to addressing problems of low achievement, high levels of student misbehavior, alienation, and high dropout rates,” Wang said.

Wang is attempting to create such a diagnostic tool by working with six Allegheny County schools in Pennsylvania so that teachers in math and science classes can better assess their student’s engagement.

In high school I personally vote for an in class bounce house, surely that would help me learn.

Photo courtesy of http://bayenn.blogspot.com