The Importance Of Child Engagement In Children

Introduction

Children engagement involves a child participating in learning and social activities, which is an important element in education. For learning to occur, it is necessary for a child to be engaged and this begins from early childhood. Engagement is linked to important developmental constructs such as executive functioning, academic achievement, emotion regulation, task orientation and compliance (Wood, Hojnoski, Laracy & Olson, 2015; Gupta, Bone, Lee & Natayanan, 2016; Herald-Brown, Kochel & Ladd, 2007).

Engagement can be defined in several ways such as ‘meaningful and appropriate interactions with materials’, ‘looking at other children who were engaged with materials’, and ‘following an activity sequence and looking at the teacher

When a child engages in communicative interactions during storytelling, it is an indication of learning. As active communicators within storytelling interactions, research has shown that these children’s language and literacy skills are accelerated much more than those who are less involved. Adult-led sustained dialogues with the use of storybooks, can help enhance emergent literacy and oral language development, including communicative initiations and engagement. When children stay engaged in storytelling sessions especially with ‘adult interactive procedures’, it increases their exposure to reading experiences, which is known to improve their emergent literacy skills (Moody et al., 2010). For example, children who were actively engaged during an adult-led storytelling session, learned more vocabulary than children who listened passively, especially when they talked more and were engaged in conversations which allowed for opportunities to use more words (Wasik & Bond,

The ‘Communicative Initiations Measure’ examines the frequency and type of children’s responses during the storytelling sessions. There are five categories of communicative initiations but we will review only four categories that relates to our topic. (1) Labelling references is when the child ask “What is that?”, (2) Story comprehension is when the child asks questions such as “Why” something is happening in the story, (3) External referencing is when the child uses content from the book to make references to what he knows outside the contents of the book, and (4) Miscellaneous referencing is when the child gives comments such as ‘Cool’, and ‘Yes’ (Moody et al., 2010).

These tools can be further adapted to suit the needs of the research such as also including eye-contact as a measurement of engagement. Assessments can also be done with the children to find out if they were engaged, such as providing them with a simple check-list to answer questions pertaining to the content of the story. This assessment can be done with facilitation from an educator to make sure that the child understands the questions asked and gave careful thought to their answers, to prevent any