Students’ Perception of Engagement with Technology during COVID-19 Emergency Remote Learning

Abstract

Guided by an engagement framework proposed by Fredricks et al. (2016), this qualitative study investigated four categories of student engagement: cognitive engagement, behavioral engagement, affective engagement, and social engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency remote learning (ERL), and what were students’ perceptions on these four engagements with technology use. The study collected data from six video conference software interviews, and the six participants were purposefully sampled to yield diverse information. The results show that technology has played important roles in student engagement. Technology, on one hand, was perceived to help students’ cognitive processing as well as to connect students and build their sense of belonging. It also served to connect the learning communities and keep students positively emotional engaged. On the other hand, technology was also perceived as a distracting factor for students, hindered the collaboration between students and their professors, and brought negative emotions to students during ERL. This study sheds light on the relationship between technology and student engagement during a special ERL environment, and hopefully it provides implications for future practice and research in an ERL environment context and beyond.