Does student engagement matter?

The end (or the beginning) of the semester is a good time to start reflecting on things you can improve in your classes and it is a good idea to include in your reflection the topic of student engagement. There is something faculty and instructors can recognize in every classroom: the look of disengaged students not paying attention in class. This is a topic that frequently shows in my conversations with faculty: how to get students engaged in required courses? How to keep students engaged in classroom activities? How to get students engaged in online classes?

Although not everyone is on the same page about this topic, it is fairly easy to recognize when students are disengaged in classes. Faculty are aware how challenging it is to motivate students in traditional in-person classes, but especially students enrolled in large classes or online classes. There might be different reasons why students are disengaged and those reasons might vary if you compare students enrolled at large land-grant universities to students enrolled at smaller institutions such as regional campuses like UM-Dearborn (the words of my statistics professor are ingrained in my head: “make sure you compare apples to apples”).

Student engagement refers to the degree of interest and attention students show in the classroom. There are many books about this topic, but this book by Dave Cormier gives you the student perspective since it was written in collaboration with college students. Phillip Schlechty compiled a list of engagement indicators describing students’ intrinsic motivation:

“The student is attentive to the task because he or she finds personal meaning and value in the task; the student sees the task as responding to motives and values he or she brings to the work.
The student persists with the task even when he or she experiences difficulty and does not compromise personal standards for completion of the task even though he or she might be able to negotiate a lower standard if he or she wanted to.
The student volunteers resources under his or her control—time, effort, and attention—which is to say that the student is committed to the work and places moral value on its completion”.

The podcast office hours with John Gardner and Brent Drake explains the importance of student engagement; Drake presents the case of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, a minority-serving regional campus with low retention rates where they focused on improving the student experience and mentoring at-risk students with encouraging results. Some things mentioned in this podcast: student learning, persistence, and academic success are factors relevant to student engagement. Student engagement can be a predictor for degree completion and retention rates.

There is so much information about student engagement; you can find peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals besides blogs (or other informal articles) that explain the importance of student engagement and how to improve courses. Here are some suggestions from different authors to improve student engagement in college classes:

Designing College Classes for Student Engagement

The National Survey of Student Engagement investigates college students participation in activities recognized in the literature as beneficial for learning and engagement. Their framework includes the following educational practices:

Academic Challenges: Higher-Order Learning, Reflective & Integrative Learning, Learning Strategies, & Quantitative Reasoning.
Learning with Peers: Collaborative Learning & Discussions with Others
Experiences with Faculty: Student-Faculty Interaction & Effective Teaching Practices
Campus Environment: Quality of Interactions & Supportive Environment

There is extensive research that shows these strategies included in this framework are effective to increase students’ engagement. Next time you are planning a course, it would be great if you consider some indicators mentioned above to get different ways to engage your students. Challenge your students to do activities or assignments that are more relevant to higher-order thinking according to the higher levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Many college assessments focus on recalling facts and memorizing information, but applying knowledge takes more effort than remembering concepts.

Another consideration could be to incorporate reflections into your assignments. This resource gives you information about the purpose of reflection. Reflection is a process beneficial to learning. If you ask your students to write a one page reflection after finishing a big project they can use this opportunity to make sense of how they developed their project and recognize what skills they gained and what they need to improve. You can ask students to reflect after an exam and how they prepared for it; next time they take an exam they will be more aware about the time they need to prepare and what activities work better. Here are some ideas for incorporating reflections in your college classroom.

Building Connections with Students

Community Building in the Classroom should be an important part of every college class, but it is even more important for the online classes. The Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework has 3 different components to build community in your class: cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence; at the intersection is where you build great learning experiences.

Having a sense of belonging is arranged in third place in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; a sense of belonging not only improves students’ well being, it also improves learning and retention. For college students this can be translated into Academic Belonging or the way they feel supported academically and connected to the campus community. There are simple things you can do to foster your students’ sense of belonging, such as learning your students’ names, besides incorporating other teaching practices. Students would like to know they are more than a student ID number. If you are teaching online, you can promote meaningful interactions in your online class, but you need to be intentional.

Making your Teaching more Engaging

Lecturing can be a great way to teach when the professor plans well-designed lessons and rehearses them before teaching the class. In addition to that, students need to make the effort to take good notes when the professor is explaining something. Lecturing does not always equate to transferring knowledge to students; proof of this is the variety of grades your students get on tests. A good lecture is about planning, preparation and a few other things.

One of the most important aspects of student learning is the degree to which students pay attention to the information you give them. Robert Gagné published the nine events of instruction to list the best conditions for learning and the first one is to gain students attention. When students are not paying attention, it is almost as bad as being absent from your class. In some cases, you can tell when someone is not paying attention to your lecture, but in others it’s not so simple.

Even in classes where there is a decent level of student engagement, there is opportunity for improving your teaching. How to Make Your Teaching More Engaging gives you many tips, such as using an energizing presentation style that shows your passion for the subject you’re teaching. Perhaps you don’t need to prepare presentation slides that are so text heavy that resemble a book and you definitely should not read the Powerpoint to them in class. See Effective PowerPoint Design.

Here is another resource if you want to make your teaching more engaging and equitable that recommends strategies you might have heard before, such as incorporating group work. If you divide your class into mini-lectures, you can alternate those with active learning activities; this makes your class more interactive and it will be time for your students to work in groups, but they could work individually too.

There are many reasons why students might be disengaged and faculty who have noticed it find it challenging to motivate students. This post might not be the only one I write about this topic since I have been thinking about this for some time. It might be worth it to keep looking at the research on student engagement, especially to what other institutions similar to Dearborn are doing.