Student's engagement in the process of mathematics learning and its effects on learning outcome

Teacher has been played a dominant role in the Chinese mathematics classroom and put the student in a passive position. In this light, "student engagement" is an important notion Chinese mathematics education has to explore during its reform in 2 century. The notion has been conceptualized in literature. Three constructs (behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement and affective engagement) were identified. By the use of classroom observations and follow-up interviews, we found that student engagement in mathematics curriculum vary not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. Their engagements, in turn, played an important role m their mathematics study.;To date, no questionnaire on student engagement is developed yet. By means of a grounded research in Shanghai primary schools, "the student engagement in the mathematics classroom scale" was developed. First of all, with classroom observations and interviews, the dimensions of student engagement were identified. The dimensions of behavioral engagement are "diligence", "study" and "time spent", the dimensions of cognitive engagement are "surface strategy"; "deep strategy" and "relying strategy" and those of affective engagement are "interest", "achievement orientation", "anxiety" and "frustration". Items were then constructed accordingly. The questionnaire was administered among 546 grade 5 students and satisfactory reliabilities; were obtained.;The mathematics performance of the above 546 students was assessed with computational items, simple problem solving items and open-ended tasks with path analysis. With path analysis, it was found their behavioral engagement was closed associated with performance in computation and simple problem solving. Cognitive engagement and affective engagement were closed associated with performance In the open-ended problem solving. Cognitive engagement and affective engagement were also significantly correlated with each other. These results suggest that students' engagement in the curriculum has great influence on student' performance in various mathematical tasks. Such results have implications on curriculum implementation too. To get students engaged in learning is of at most importance in the Chinese mathematics education. The present research attributes to the theory of student engagement with questionnaire, which is ready to use in future research.