In this paper, we study some significant learning engagement theory and the application of engagement in learning context. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend studying engagement as a multifaceted construct. There is an app called Tinycard that I think applied those learning engagement theory. I will introduce more details about how engagement on digital devices can benefit to learning experience in this paper.

There have been stubborn and persistent educational problems facing students today. Those problems include underachievement as well as learning, behavioral and emotional difficulties that eventually lead to school dropout for many students (e.g., Newmann, 1992; Steiberg, Brown, & Dornbusch, 1996). For some students, learning at school is more like a grading game, instead of an interesting process of learning. High engagement could be a sign to predict continuing motivation and commitment as well as overall performance in later study. For instance, great engagement in high school can probably produce motivation and positive performance in college. Similarly, the great engagement in sex education in an appropriate environment could offer people a healthy sexual habit in the future.

The purpose of learning/class engagement is to increase attention as representing a possible antidote to decline academic interests and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental changes (Fredricks et al., 2004). The concept of students' engagement here is based on the culmination of concentration, interest, and enjoyment (Shernoff et al., 2003).

In a broader context, learning engagement happens not only at school, but also out of school, such as flipped classroom or learning technologies. The time students at school and in class is very limited. Meanwhile, the teaching techniques at school is also quite limited. There are more and more new technologies that help students to improve their learning engagement through invoking their interests and motivation. In the past few decades, human-computer interaction studies have emphasized the need to move beyond usability to understand and design for more engaging experiences (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006; Jacques, Preece, & Carey, 1995; Laurel, 1993). Studies related to how to attract user’s attention or form an online learning community. These new learning technologies not merely offer educational content, they engage learners. Moreover, new learning technologies provide learners with more opportunities to save their time and money. For example, learners can watch class video online over and over again, and use management tools to arrange their studies. Everything is more convenient and engaging.

The most popular example of learning engagement is student participating the class, through answering a question, discussing with classmates and writing comments on virtual classroom. These learning engagement approaches can reflect learner's thinking and perception of the class content.

Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend studying engagement as a multifaceted construct. According to Fredricks, the multifaceted nature of engagement is also reflected in research literature, which defines engagement in three ways.

Behavioral engagement draws on the idea of participation. It includes involvement in academic and social or extra curricula activities and is considered crucial for achieving positive academic outcomes and preventing dropping out [image 01]. Emotional engagement encompasses positive and negative reactions to teachers, students and schools. It can create ties to an institution and influence willingness to do the work [image 02]. Finally, cognitive engagement draws on the idea of investment. It incorporates thoughtfulness and willingness to exert the effort necessary to comprehend complex ideas and master difficult skills [image 03].

(image is from http://www.clipartkid.com/raise-hand-cliparts/) 

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(image is from https://listenlearnmusic.com/2012/02/i-like-to-clap-to-the-beat.html) 

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(image is from http://www.optimallearningsolutions.net)

Research on behavioral engagement is related to that on student conduct and on-task behavior (Peterson, Swing, Stark, & Wass, 1984). Research on emotional engagement is related to that on student attitudes (Epstein & McPartland, 1976; Yamamoto, Thomas, & Karns, 1969) and student interest and values (Eccles et al., 1983). Research on cognitive engagement is related to that on motivational goals and selfregulated learning (Boekarts, Pintrich, & Zeidner, 2000; Zimmerman, 1990). Engagement can vary in intensity and duration; it can be short term and situation specific or long term and stable. The goal of redesigning teaching approaches and new learning technologies is to increase learners’ engagement and make the engagement enduring. In general, the more engagement happens, the better learning outcome will be. And sometimes, or for most of situations, more than one type of engagements is involved. So the goal of managing students' engagement is to adjust their learning outcomes, since students are able to improve their attention, participation, reation, and willingness. That means that the motivation of improving the learning outcome make every element of engagement important.

Since I have a specific interest in engaging technologies in learning environment, I want to emphasize theory of engagement with technology. The engaging technologies in recent a few decades highly rely on computers and the Internet. And learners’ experience is the key concern of the future development of educational technologies. There are previous studies about engaging theories. According to O’Brien, these theories all together built user experience and learning engagement, including Flow theory, Aesthetic theory, Play theory, information interaction and attribute of engagement. The overall function of application of those theory is to produce and increase interest, creativity, confidence, attention, concentration, mood, self-esteem, and effectiveness of communication. Through different techniques, platform and approaches, educators with developers together make the curriculum and instruction be able to increase learners’ interests, creativity, confidence, attention, concentration, mood, etc.

Here is a video explaining more detaild strategies of learning engagement:

Learning engagement can be applied to school management, class curricula, teachers' instructions, video games, online class, flipped class, mobile devices, VR or 3D, and speech or NLP. Regarding to content, learning engagement can be applied to diverse areas, for instance, teaching a specific skill, or targeting at a specific outcome, such as creativity, social skills, math, Taichi, athletic exercises, promoting awareness of problems, computational thinking, etc. And some of approaches are exploration or discovery, question asking, feedback, variety, challenge, and interactivity. Exploration, discovery or challenge can evoke learners’ curiosity and motivation to pursue. And this would lead learners to take actions with cognitive engagement. The unknown and difficulty of questions could involve emotion engagement as well.

I would like to introduce a mobile application that involves in learning engagement. One of my favorite educational gaming apps is called Tinycards. Tinycards is also one of the most popular educational apps in App Store. It’s a learning mobile app, that teaches various basic knowledge through card memory and quizzes. The style is cartoonish and looks neat and clean. I think learners on Tinycards is broad, including kids, youth, foreigners and probably app lovers. The content includes languages, math, geography, plants, minerals, programming, Excel, animals, and common sense, such as faces on U.S. currency, name of Pokemons, color theory, famous European football clubs and Geek gods [Image 4]. The learning process is asking learners to pick one specific group of card, such as faces on U.S. Currency and go through all the cards.

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(Image 4 to image 9 are from the app screenshots: Tinycards) 

It is not a complicated game at all. The only challenging thing is just the quiz. When learner opens a specific group of cards, there will be a card with image on the front and the word on the back. Learner will need to click or tab the front card to flip over the card to see the word on the back [Image 5]. Once the learner remembers the card content, the learner can swipe the card to any direction to move forward to next card. The action of sweeping, taping, selecting and filling out all serve as physical participation. Learner’s physical participation can produce learner’s persistence and make sure that learner is thinking while they are moving forward. The participation here, which is the action of taping, sweeping, coordinating with memorizing the content, keeping learner concentrating on the cards. Those positive physical engagements all form leaner’s study and lead to positive study outcomes.

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Then the learner will see one more option. Then there will be a question card to ask the learner to recognize the card and select it from two options provided [Image 6]. The will be one more card added and ask the learner to do a multiple-choice question with three options (two of options are from last iteration) [Image 7]. This process of adding and repetition create a hierarchy for the learning experience. Along with the learner going further, there will be more and more cards, and hard questions. 

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There will be a happy face showing on the card if the learner answers the question correctly, with a bravo sound. In converse, there will be a sad face showing on the card if the answer is wrong, with a sigh. This approach is trying to increase emotion engagement. When learner get encouragement from the bravo, then learner keeps interests and believe that she or he is able to go through this learning process. And the sounds of sigh can be a challenge for the learner.

There is also cognitive engagement involved in the learning procedure on Tinycards. Learners pick their topic of cards based on their own interests. They can pick one they are interested the most among the long lists of topics. And even for every topic, there are several groups/levels content based on its difficulty. After finishing one level, learners have their choices of keep learning or wait a bit or switch to another topic, which involves self-regulation [image 9]. Learners are able to be strategic and control their learning paces based on their own interests or perception. The flexibility of when, how, where and what to learn can produce motivation and encourage learners to actively participate, and this contrasts with the idea that students think school is always boring and the same I mentioned earlier.

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I want to introduce another educational training program on mobile devices. It’s called Daily Workout. Daily Workout allows user to choose one specific body part leaners want to train, including abdomen, arm, butt, cardio, leg and full body [image 10]. For each of those section, there will be a video demo with text description. The text indicates key instructions and which specific part this training works for [image 11]. The video will repeat the same motion for a few times, so learners are able to memorize it and do it later on by themselves. Users can also manage their learning procedure by themselves. They have freedom to skip a demo or go back to last demo. After each demo, learners are given 30 seconds to follow the video to repeat the action and practice by themselves. There is a countdown of 30s with “ding” sounds in every second, and the trainer in the demo is still repeating the action. Learners’ participation is required by these countdown and video instructions. Learners tend to follow the instruction at this stage because the context evokes their physical engagement, and their physical engagement can last 30 seconds in each action practice. If users enter their information of age, gender and weight in settings, the app will calculate how many calories burned at the end of each training. The number of burned calories could encourage learners to persistently take other trainings and produce self-esteem.

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(Image 10 and image 11 is from the app: Daily Workout) 

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The three types of engagement happen at the same time sometimes and serve as effective approaches. Engagement is the first and most important step of delivery of teaching instruments. The goal of new learning technologies is to assist learners to learn with increasing their engagement. I expect to see more and more innovative and effective teaching technologies coming up.