EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL IDENTITY AND ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT: A MULTI-COHORT LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS
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Abstract
This article investigates the longitudinal relationship between students’ social identity and academic engagement across three successive university cohorts, integrating multi-cohort data spanning four academic years. Using responses to the survey instrument, along with institutional records and longitudinal tracking for a subset of those samples, the analysis showed that students' affiliations with their learning community were significantly associated with motivation, as well as persistence and overall satisfaction in academia. In this way, the study is consistent with Ma, Sun, and Wang (2022) wherein social identity influences learning and that it does so through increased engagement (i.e., stronger attachment to others based upon shared personnel characteristics). This latter no doubt demonstrates how feeling part of something or membership can translate into enhanced labor returns. Moreover, drawing upon data on the size of contextual disturbances (i.e., COVID-19), the study also probes whether temporal fluctuations in student engagement trajectories are associated with context changes that might intersect with Craig & Hsu's (2025) work on temporary recollections of experience and perceptions of active learning. In placing the analysis in this greater international-context of longitudinal, and multi-cohort research (e.g., Wu & Becker 2023; Maire & Chesters 2024) these findings demonstrate how personal, social and institutional presences interact with one another over time to construct these pathways of academic learning. This work advances our understanding of how identity shapes educational outcomes, and ultimately advocates for universities to enlist social identities as a strategic asset crucial to maintaining engagement, bolstering motivation and servicing academic persistence within tertiary-level education.
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