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Introduction
Instruction based learning is a complex phenomenon that depends on several known and unknown factors of social, psychological, biological and ecological nature. It is a deliberate, conducive and intelligently articulated presumably classroom-based activity for the current generation, to know the accumulated knowledge, both in skills and wisdom, of the previous generations. Such learning, being multidimensional, determined by many parameters including the engagement of the students to the class which plays a pivotal role in students learning and retention, both at school and university level. Almost all learning models emphasize the role of students' engagement in the overall success of the learning. The article focuses on these students' engagement concerning factors that constitute it, especially at the university level. These factors lead to a naïve definition of classroom engagement, in general. Assuring active participation, the engagement is the main pillar of almost all learning models.
Background for the study
The importance of student engagement for learning has been well studied in the past. It has a direct relationship with successful school completion, having adequate and required skill-set and intellect capabilities and plugging dropouts (Christenson et al., 2008; Finn and Owings, 2006; Morse et al., 2004; Reschly and Christenson, 2006). It has a positive relationship with a better students' attention (Blasco-Arcas et al., 2013; Gilboy et al., 2015), attendance (Gershenson, 2016) and performance within the class with an increased level of effort, persistence (Moreira et al., 2013; Zhou, 2017), self-regulation (Cho and Kim, 2013; Klem and Connell, 2004), goal orientation (Bakker et al., 2015) and challenge-acceptance. It is also positively associated with desired academic, social and learning outcomes (Rasheed et al., 2020).
The literature is replete with numerous works establishing its importance in different dimensions. It is an experience that has its roots in the classrooms and is based, however, on many others, with both endogenous and exogenous, dimensions. The literature on the topic seems to be split between schools of thought which are either based upon constructivist theory (Ginsburg and Opper, 1988; Wadsworth, 1996), which involves factors endogenous to the classroom itself, and the socio-cultural theory (Hickey and Granade, 2004; Lantolf, 2000; Vygotskiĭ, 2012), which involves factors mostly exogenous in nature. The assessment of the experience is typically...