Abstract: The dominant research approach to student engagement in higher education follows a behavioral perspective, which neglects the possible discrepancies between students’ behavioral engagement and psychological status, making largely invisible the links between student engagement and specific socio-cultural contexts. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the research on student engagement in higher education to shift its views and include diverse perspectives. The Motivation and Engagement Wheel, a psychological perspective of student engagement, provides a more appropriate conceptual framework and research tools. Targeting Chinese university students, three empirical studies based on the Motivation and Engagement Wheel revealed a series of findings. First, there were four types of learners among Chinese university students according to their motivation and engagement, and two of them showed some discrepancies between their internal motivation and external behaviors. Those “maladaptive but engaged learners” typically reflect the influence of Chinese cultural and educational traditions on student engagement. Second, although the relationships between motivation and engagement largely echoed Anglo-American researchers’ previous findings, maladaptive motivation was found to sometimes facilitate, rather than impair Chinese university students’ engagement. These findings reflect the cultural specificity of student engagement in higher education. Third, students’ course experiences significantly influenced their motivation and engagement. According to the nature of effects, these course experience factors can be classified as ideal, paradoxical and weird indicators. The paradoxical and weird indicators mirror some characteristics and long-standing problems of university teaching and learning in China. To improve the quality of university teaching, academic affairs administrators and instructors should clarify the connotations of good teaching in higher education, attach more importance to the cultivation of students’ independence and self-regulated learning, and promote assessment for learning in university teaching. They also need to pay attention to the double-edge effects of Chinese cultural and pedagogical traditions on learning and teaching in higher education. Meanwhile, although the three studies follow a psychological perspective, they can not only help us identify the close associations between student engagement and the socio-cultural context in China, but also take account of students’ engagement behaviors, which makes it possible for researchers to conduct student engagement research from a holistic perspective in future.

Key words: student engagement, Motivation and Engagement Wheel, university students, quality assurance, learning and teaching in higher education