Promoting Student Engagement From Childhood to Adolescence as a Way to Improve Positive Youth Development and School Completion

Abstract Student behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement is now recognized as an important factor associated with youth positive development, adjustment, and perseverance in school. In contrast, student disengagement on these dimensions has been found to be linked to a number of negative outcomes—such as increases in behavior problems, drug use, delinquency, and depression—central to the process of students dropping out of high school. From kindergarten to 12th grade, effective prevention and intervention programs can be implemented to promote student engagement, both for its own sake and as a way to promote positive development and school completion. Unfortunately, many of these universal, selective, intensive, or multilevel programs have not been evaluated rigorously or do not meet the general requirements associated with effective prevention and intervention strategies. This chapter will discuss the negative consequences of student disengagement and the importance of engagement for school completion. It will also present examples of rigorously evaluated interventions that are associated with higher behavioral, affective, and/or cognitive engagement of students across different stages of schooling.