How to Measure Engagement

My classmate Edie showed me a very interesting article from Taiwan about ubiquitous learning.  The idea behind it is that learning is everywhere and the more we can guide students to take advantage of the whole range of opportunity out in the world the better.  In order to document this experience and to keep track of the students (I think they actually tracked them on GPS) mobile devices were used extensively.  In the literature review the work on student engagement was analysed and parameters documented.  The researchers decided to use four parameters that were common in the most "important" work of Jonassen (1995), Karppinen (2005) and Grabe& Grabe (2007).  They found students were most engaged when the learning was active, authentic, constructive and cooperative.  Huang and his group then created a table to show the characteristics of each U-Learning computer based technology and how they could be used to capitalize on these needs.
Some sample survey documents are included in the appendix of the paper.

Hall, G., Heavin, E., McKay, J., Richardson J., Whittleton, P. (2012)  Building bridges:  an interdisciplinary inquiry approach.  Unpublished Design Brief presented to Inquiry and Technology (EDER 779.02) class. 

Huang, Y.-M., Chiu, P.-S., Liu, T.-C., & Chen, T.-S. (2011). The design and implementation of a meaningful learning-based evaluation method for ubiquitous learning. Computers & Education, 57(4), 2291-2302. Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2011.05.023