Though higher education scholars have long known that undergraduate student engagement is associated with student persistence, they have yet to fully unravel its character and how it evolves over time. We argue that this is in part due to the individualistic, static ways engagement is measured even though scholars recognize it as a fundamentally relational concept. In our theoretical exploration, we draw on existing thinking about engagement in higher education and fit it to a social network paradigm that is well suited to conceptualizing and measuring relational, multidimensional, and dynamic phenomena such as student engagement. We conclude with suggestions for research and practice to further explore the longitudinal character of student engagement and how network analysis may be employed to explore the roles of engagement in persistence.

中文翻译：

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解开学生参与：探索其关系和纵向特征

尽管高等教育学者早就知道本科生的参与与学生的坚持有关，但他们尚未完全揭示其特征以及它如何随着时间的推移而演变。我们认为，这部分是由于测量参与度的个人主义、静态方式，尽管学者们认为它是一个基本的关系概念。在我们的理论探索中，我们借鉴了关于高等教育参与的现有思考，并将其与社会网络范式相匹配，该范式非常适合概念化和衡量关系、多维和动态现象，例如学生参与。最后，我们提出了研究和实践建议，以进一步探索学生参与的纵向特征，以及如何使用网络分析来探索参与在持久性中的作用。