Recognizing the importance of campus community is not new. Residence halls, student clubs, campus activities, and sororities and fraternities are all extracurricular examples of ways institutions foster a sense of students belonging to a social community. Across the curriculum, educators hope students will work diligently to become part of a community of scholars. In between the social community fostered by the “extracurriculum” and the earned membership into the scholarly community that is typically signified by graduation, is the curriculum—the courses where students have traditionally been expected to do their work individually and independently. Students sit in rows facing the professor, and are urged to refrain from talking to each other because this is disruptive and distracting. Fortunately, that model is now changing, with many educators proposing that optimal, engaged classroom environments are those in which the teacher and students perceive themselves as members of a learning community.
Although there is debate in the literature over the definition of learning communities (with “purposeful pairing of courses” a common definition), for our purposes in discussing student engagement in a single classroom, we shall adopt Cross's (1998c) definition of “groups of people engaged in intellectual interaction for the purpose of learning” (p. 4). The term “learning community” seems appropriate for two reasons. First, it places the emphasis on learning. Second, the term suggests that this learning occurs within a community—a group of people working together with shared interests, common goals, and responsibilities toward one another and the group as a whole (Brophy, 2004). In a learning community, the overarching goal is learning, but this learning is best achieved in environments where students feel a sense of belonging, and where they are comfortable responding to questions when they are unsure of the answer and seeking help from the teacher or from their peers when they don't understand. Building learning communities that help students feel connected to rather than isolated or alienated from the teacher and their classmates addresses a basic, motivational human need to be part of a social community.
The effectiveness of promoting the interaction that characterizes a learning community is well documented. Pascarella and Terenzini's (1991) first synthesis of the research on the impact of college on students concluded that a large part of students' gains in college in terms of factual knowledge and a range of general cognitive and intellectual skills is determined by the extent to which students interact with faculty members and student peers in and out of the classroom (p. 620). In their follow-up work synthesizing research conducted in the 1990s, they comment on the “broad spectrum” of research on group work as a pedagogical approach and state, “The weight of evidence from this research is reasonably consistent in suggesting that collaborative learning approaches can significantly enhance learning” (2005, p. 103). They describe a study by Karabenick and Collins-Eaglin (1997) that used data from over 1,000 students in 57 classes and found that the greater the class emphasis on collaborative learning and the lower the emphasis on grades, the more likely students were to use higher-order learning strategies of elaboration, comprehension monitoring, and critical thinking (2005, p. 180).
In another study, Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) took the raw data from a meta-analysis of 43 experimental and quasi-experimental studies by Qin, Johnson, and Johnson (1995) that considered the effects of cooperative versus individualistic or competitive learning approaches on general problem-solving skills. Four types of problems were considered: linguistic (problems solved in written or oral languages); nonlinguistic (problems represented in pictures, graphs, symbols, mazes, or formulas); well-defined problems with precise operational procedures and solutions (such as a chess problem); and ill-defined problems (problems that do not have clear procedures or solutions, such as deciding which car to buy). Pascaraella and Terenzini removed 20 of the 43 studies that were carried out in postsecondary samples, conducted their own meta-analysis, and concluded that “college students learning in cooperative groups had a statistically significant advantage in overall problem solving of .47 of a standard deviation” and that the advantage in problem solving was essentially the same for both well-defined problems and ill-defined problems (p. 180).
Collaborative learning is also in alignment with the model that knowledge is socially constructed rather than discovered. Bruffee (1993), in his philosophy of nonfoundational social construction, proposes, “We construct and maintain knowledge not by examining the world but by negotiating with one another in communities of knowledgeable peers” (p. 9). Finally, building classroom learning communities in which all students feel respected and valued may also address criticisms by Bensimon (2007) and others of some definitions of student engagement. Their critiques express concern that current approaches to measuring student engagement are part of a dominant paradigm that fails to take into consideration theories about marginalized groups, focusing too much on the student's lack of engagement, and not enough on exposing the existing structures that disempower students. They emphasize the responsibility of institutional agents to create more empowering and engaging conditions for all students to succeed. College teachers can support institutional efforts toward this goal by helping all students feel that they are included, honored, important, contributing members of a learning community. In short, creating conditions in which students interact with each other as members of a learning community promotes student engagement and creates synergy between motivation and active learning: It fulfills the basic human need to be part of a social community and also encourages students to learn actively as they collaboratively construct, reconstruct, and build their understanding.
Condition 2: Teachers Can Create Synergy by Helping Students Work at Their Optimal Level of Challenge
One of the fundamental principles of learning is that tasks must be sufficiently difficult to pose a challenge, but not so difficult as to destroy the willingness to try (McKeachie, 1994, p. 353). Somewhere between “been there, done that” and “dazed and confused” lies the optimal level of challenge that engages students. Vygotsky (1978) coined the term zone of proximal development (ZPD) to suggest that learning is productive when learners are operating in a situation that exposes them to concepts and ideas just slightly above their current level of development. The theory, applied to student engagement, suggests that engaged learning occurs in the gap between a learner's current understanding and potential understanding. Working at the optimal challenge level creates synergy because it straddles both motivation and active learning.
In terms of motivation, Brophy (2004) suggests that anxiety and a mismatch of task to skill are the chief threats to the flow potential that characterizes deep engagement. When students face challenging tasks but do not think they possess the necessary skills, they experience anxiety; when skill is high but the task is not challenging, students become bored; when both challenge and skill level are low, students become apathetic. All three qualities—anxiousness, boredom, and apathy—characterize lack of engagement. From the perspective of active learning, an important aspect of schema theory is that the mind not only decodes what is said or written and makes the connections to existing knowledge, but also that it supplies much that is not present.
Cross (1993c) describes work done by Crawford and Chaffin (1986), who offer the simple sentence, “The little girl heard the ice cream man and rushed upstairs to get her piggy bank.” Most of us reading that sentence know what it means, even though the sentence itself says nothing about ice cream vendors moving along the street,