HOW IS GENDER RESEARCHED IN THE CONTEXT OF STUDENT ENGAGEMENT? A SCOPING REVIEW AT THE SECONDARY LEVEL
Keywords:
gender, student engagement, scoping review, secondary education, research practiceAbstract
Gender is almost consistently included in student engagement research, yet the way gender is studied is rarely systematic. This scoping review maps how gender is researched in the context of student engagement at the secondary school level between 2023 and 2026, focusing on research practice rather than on what is found about gender differences. The review followed the Arksey and O'Malley framework and the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, used a Population-Concept-Context search strategy across six databases, and produced a final corpus of fifteen studies charted across four dimensions, namely the conceptualization and operationalization of gender, paradigm and design, the analytical role of gender, and the engagement framework used. The mapping shows that gender is most often placed as a moderator or interaction term (47%) and as an untheorized covariate (33%), while only 20% of studies make it the analytical focus. Across these categories, gender tends to be controlled statistically rather than examined meaningfully: non-significant interactions are frequently dropped, while significant main effects are left uninterpreted. Gender is almost always operationalized as a self-reported binary category, all studies rest on a positivist paradigm with no qualitative or critical approaches, and identities beyond the binary are barely represented. The review offers a reflective map of research practice and underscores the urgency of moving from gender as controlled variable toward examining how gender operates within specific school and cultural contexts.
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