Eudaimonia and engagement in the classroom: Using experience sampling in an exploratory study of well-being in high school students

This study examined 21 high school students' self-reports of their feelings of Eudaimonia, and academic engagement (Marks, 2000) in their classes over a two-week period. Data were collected using the Experience Sampling Method (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987) by repeatedly sending an Experience Sampling Form (ESF) to students' mobile phones during the school day. The students responded from 5 to 35 times for a total of 279 responses to the survey.;Eudaimonia is a type of well-being centered around the psychological concept of self-actualization. Eudaimonia was measured using a 15-item scale adapted from the work of Waterman (2010) and Ryff (1989). Measures of academic engagement were drawn from the work of Marks (2000). The study focused on three research questions: Students' reports of their experience of Eudaimonia in the classroom, how these reports varied by context and whether Eudaimonia and engagement shared a relationship in these classroom experiences.;Overall the students reported their states of well-being over this two-week period to be between neutral and eudaimonic on the 5-point Likert scales, with a smaller number of reports of occasions when they were very eudaimonic or non-eudaimonic. Students' reports of their levels of Eudaimonia and academic engagement varied significantly across different subject matter classes and time of day.;This exploratory study shows the potential value of using the Experience Sampling Method to teachers and schools to gather real-time self-reports of students' engagement and Eudaimonia levels. The results suggest a specific logic model where subject matter departments influence the experiencing of 4 components of Eudaimonia. This model may further imply that these 4 components may work together to form the larger construct of Eudaimonia, which in turn may act as a predictor of academic engagement. Keeping in mind what should be considerable concerns over the final sample size used in the study, methods and models such as these could be used to better understand how to create more optimal learning environments to promote students to engage in authentic, self-actualizing activities leading to academically engaged states.;Keywords: Eudaimonia, Engagement, Well-Being, High School, Experience Sampling.