Life-long learning, conscientious disposition, and longitudinal measures of academic engagement in engineering design teamwork

• Life-long learning was assessed as an attribute that could support academic engagement.
• Life-long learning created higher resilience in academic engagement levels over a semester.
• Life-long learning appears to be a stronger predictor of academic engagement than conscientiousness.

The capability of life-long learning is a stable set of attributes and skills related to interest in and self-regulation of continuous learning. This and other attributes related to professional skill development have been increasingly viewed as a priority for the development in post-secondary education, rather than solely focusing on technical and discipline-specific knowledge acquisition. In the current study we examined the role of life-long learning as an antecedent of academic engagement in a university course using student engineering project teams with extensive team-related deliverables. We adopted multilevel longitudinal methodology and analytics to support several novel contributions. First, the general trend over the course of the semester was a decrease in academic engagement, but only for students low on the attribute of life-long learning. Second, life-long learning was a significant predictor of all 12 indicators of academic engagement over three time periods. Third, life-long learning was more important for academic engagement than other dispositional variables known to be relevant, namely conscientiousness and its facet of achievement-striving. As such, this adds unique evidence in support of recent accreditation initiatives, interventions, and learning structures that promote life-long learning development.