92 Chapter 4 or be defined by course designers or educational policy. Therefore, we suggest teachers to focus on the antecedents that are modifiable. 3) The suggestion to focus on the intention behind behavior warrants a little elaboration. Intention is not always directly observable for teachers. It has to be inferred from observations and cues related to the learning and group process. Oftentimes, observable behavior (like silence and use of electronic devices) is used to form negative judgments of students (9,29–32,35,36). However, as we confirmed in this study, the same behavior can fit both engagement and disengagement. The student’s intention is what matters. Teachers can therefore make better use of their observations by prompting students to engage and learn their intentions at the same time. A prompt for teachers could be: ‘I see you listening attentively to the discussion. What are your thoughts?’ or ‘I see you typing on your laptop. What did you find worthwhile from this discussion to take note of?’ Such an approach would fit well with previously identified student preferences for small-group learning environments, in which a teacher creates a positive, non-threatening group atmosphere and at the same time gains information about students’ engagement (26,50). Making use of open and inviting prompts could also help to avoid situations in which teachers would make incorrect assumptions about students’ (dis)engagement. Strengths and limitations Video-stimulated recall depends on the recall of events. Therefore, we interviewed students as quickly as possible after the recorded study group meeting. However, due to logistic reasons some interviews were held several days after the group meeting. Although the video did improve recall, some students reported to have difficulty recalling their thoughts. Additionally, we acknowledge that the interviews themselves were a conversational setting which might have led students to express themselves in a certain way and in another setting might have answered differently. However, in line with our social constructivist stance, the interviews allowed us to co-construct knowledge with the participants by gaining insights into the thinking behind behavior, thoughts and feelings (51). In line with our finding that distinguishing engagement from disengagement can be difficult, we had the same experience during the data collection. When we showed the selected moments to students during the interviews, we did not provide a reason for selecting that moment. For example, when we selected a moment on video we thought showed disengagement (student looking out the window), the student would elaborate on how he was engaged (thinking hard about a specific bias in research). The reverse also happened (student being disengaged while the researcher assessed the student to be engaged from the video recording). This strengthens our finding that it indeed can be difficult for teachers to distinguish engagement from disengagement.
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