A Study Of The College Students’ Learning Engagement

The quality of the higher education has attracted more and more attention from the society since the higher education expanded more than10years ago in China. How to improve the quality of higher education? In the1980s, some scholars began to focus the research perspective on the students when higher education boomed in European and American, especially regard the college students’learning engagement as the key point of solving problems of the quality of the higher education. Learning engagement is that students spend a lot of time and energy in learningLearning engagement is the students’investment in time and energy actually in the process of learning, and is also the reflection of mental state when studying. There is a direct causal relationship between the development of college students and their learning engagement.Therefore, the study of learning engagement has important significance to promote the students’learning and development, thus improve the quality of our country’s higher education.How is the college students’learning engagement with the improvement of the qualities of college’s conditions and teachers? Will the difference in the students’ specialty identity have an effect on their learning engagement under the condition that universities enroll and train talents by the specialty? They are the center problems in this study.This study firstly chose the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale—student(UWES-S)translated by Fang Laitan and the college students’specialty identity questionnaire translated by Qin Panbo as the tools of the survey after having read and researched literature relevant to the learning engagement and specialty identity theory.Secondly, the study measure the college students’learning engagement and specialty identity in six universities in Zhejiang province by using two questionnairesThe results show that:(1)The college students’learning engagement is in the lower middle level;the order of learning engagement components is vigor, dedication and absorption.;(2) There is significant difference of gender, grade and the choice of the specialty in their learning engagement:There is significant difference of sex and the choice of the specialty in their vigor, dedication, absorption and learning engagement; there is significant difference of grade in their vigor, absorption and learning engagement.(3) The college students’specialty identity is in the lower middle level. Total score of college students’learning engagement questionnaire and total score of specialty identity is correlation significant(r=0.740, p<0.001),and specialty identity can predict effectively learning engagement, and the factor of behavior is the principal influence.Finally, taking interviews with the college students to find and analyze the reasons behind on their learning engagement and specialty identity, and to put forward some concrete and effective suggestions to improve the college students’ learning engagement.