Goulet and colleagues conducted a systematic review and three-level meta-analysis to examine the effects of different intervention strategies on elementary school students’ engagement and to compare which approaches were most effective in promoting behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement. Following PRISMA guidelines, the study included 53 studies covering 46 interventions and a total of 38,225 students. Of these interventions, 39 used randomized controlled trials and 7 used quasi-experimental designs. The interventions were classified into three main categories: teacher support, mainly involving teacher professional development; student-directed interventions, which directly targeted students; and multimodal interventions, which simultaneously supported students and their family or school environments. The meta-analysis used a three-level random-effects model with robust variance estimation to account for dependencies among multiple effect sizes within the same study, and methodological bias was further examined as a moderator.
The results showed that interventions had the most consistent positive effect on elementary students’ behavioral engagement, with an overall effect size of g = .386. All three intervention types produced significant effects. Teacher support showed the largest effect (g = .503, 95% CI [.105, .901]), followed by multimodal interventions (g = .385, 95% CI [.202, .569]) and student-directed interventions (g = .370, 95% CI [.198, .542]), although there were no significant differences among the three approaches (F = 0.22, p = .808). Further comparisons among student-directed strategies showed that learning strategy development had the largest effect (g = .801, 95% CI [.318, 1.285]) and was significantly more effective than social-emotional learning (SEL; g = .171, 95% CI [.027, .314]; p = .003). Classroom physical activity also showed a relatively large effect (g = .478), but its confidence interval included zero (95% CI [–.100, 1.056]), indicating that the result was less stable.
Overall, the study indicates that elementary school students’ engagement is malleable, but different dimensions of engagement respond differently to intervention. The strongest evidence currently concerns behavioral engagement. In particular, improving teachers’ instructional and classroom management practices through workshops, coaching, feedback, and reflective activities, as well as directly developing students’ learning strategies such as planning, organization, self-monitoring, and reflection, appear especially promising. In comparison, interventions focusing only on students’ social-emotional skills have more limited effects, while the evidence for physical activity remains uncertain. The authors therefore suggest that schools prioritize investment in teacher professional development and student learning strategy training when designing engagement interventions, while avoiding the assumption that a single approach can improve behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement equally. Future research should also include more measures of affective and cognitive engagement and adopt higher-quality research designs to build a stronger evidence base.
Source (Open Access): Goulet, J., Archambault, I., Maltais, C., Gilbert-Blanchard, O., & Janosz, M. (2026). Promoting engagement in elementary school: A systematic review and meta-analysis of intervention effects. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), 107.