This paper asks a question that sits well outside the mainstream engagement literature: what happens to the concept of student engagement when it is handed over to a commercial EdTech platform to measure, visualise and report? The answer, the author argues, is that engagement is fundamentally rewritten — narrowed, quantified and quietly enrolled into a framework of neoliberal governance that has little to do with what researchers or teachers actually mean when they talk about it.
The study takes Education Perfect, a widely used gamified learning platform in Australian and New Zealand secondary schools, as its case. Using the walkthrough method — a digital research approach developed for analysing apps and platforms — the author conducted a systematic analysis of the platform’s engagement dashboard, its Live Feed functionality, and the company’s own marketing and tutorial materials, collecting 96 screenshots and examining textual and visual representations of engagement throughout.
The analytical framework draws on poststructuralist discourse theory, specifically the “logics” approach developed by Glynos and Howarth, which distinguishes between social logics (what a practice does), political logics (why it operates as it does and what alternatives it forecloses), and phantasmatic logics (the underlying fantasy that keeps the whole thing coherent). Using this lens, Zomer identifies four interlocking logics that structure how Education Perfect frames student engagement.
The logic of measurability holds that engagement is expressible as a number — time spent, logins, questions answered, activities completed. The author points out that these metrics frequently fail even on positivist grounds: “time spent” measures how long a student had a window open, not whether they were thinking; “idle” status (marked by a sleeping icon) captures the absence of keyboard input, which could equally mean a student is thinking carefully. The logic of output maximisation follows directly: because engagement is a number, it can always be higher, and the platform’s design consistently implies that higher numbers are better. The dashboard allows teachers to sort students by metric, placing highest scorers at the top, and the school-level view asks “how is your school tracking?” against previous years — a framing that imports competitive pressure into what had been a psychological construct. The logic of accountability frames engagement data as evidence teachers can present to parents at interviews or include in reports — not to understand students but to demonstrate performance. The logic of surveillance is most visible in the Live Feed, which shows teachers in real time whether each student has the correct browser tab open and flags “idle” time to the second, overlaid with a yellow eye icon. The author draws on Haggerty and Ericson’s concept of the “data double” to describe how this creates a persistent digital copy of each student’s attentional behaviour — a profile that is stored, accumulated, and available for review.
Taken together these logics do not merely simplify engagement — they displace it. The emotional, cognitive and social dimensions that engagement researchers have spent decades trying to capture are effectively erased in favour of what is technologically trackable. The author’s conclusion is not that engagement data are useless, but that they are ideologically loaded in ways that teachers, school leaders and policymakers rarely see: they appear neutral and data-driven while actually encoding assumptions about competition, surveillance and the reduction of learning to output.