Engagement in Higher Education: Self-evaluations of University Students in Spain

Author(s):

Paulo Padilla-Petry(presenting / submitting)Jennifer Vadeboncoeur Raquel Miño-Puigcercós

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

22. Research in Higher Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

22 SES 03 D,

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

17:15-18:45

Room:

K5.19

Chair:

Contribution

Poor retention rates in and the cost of Higher Education (HE) concern both HE institutions and governments (Bryson & Hand, 2007; McCormick & McClenney, 2012). Student retention in HE has been associated with student engagement (Hu, 2010), a major topic of research related to learning, academic success and different positive outcomes in life including mental well-being, lifelong learning, student resilience, moral, ethical and psychosocial development (Baron & Corbin, 2012). In a mainstream approach to student engagement in HE, there appears to be a shift of onus from student to institution given that poor student engagement affects institutional reputations (Harper and Quaye, 2009; Kahn, 2014). Student engagement in HE tends to be linked to quality assurance mechanisms and competitive advantage; students are perceived as both consumers and commodities. In this context, academic capitalism comprises both the action of the public university in response to neoliberal market policies and the students’ engagement that is restricted to activities from which they can profit (Baron & Corbin, 2012). A passive consumer attitude is related to the fees charged by institutions (Richards & Richards, 2013; Robinson, 2012; Zepke et al., 2014) and the entertainment model of teaching in which education is a product, rather than a process (Robinson, 2012). Students may seem more engaged with getting a good job later than with HE itself, thus, as a means to an end (Bryson & Hand, 2007).

The desirable forms of student engagement depend on the ideological basis of each educational approach: proper student engagement in one framework may be seen as excessively passive in another context (Gourlay, 2015). However, what “unites the various elements of ‘legitimate’ engagement is the focus on activity which is communicative, recordable, public, observable and often communal” (Gourlay, 2015, p. 404). In an active learning scale, a student who does not ask questions is thought to be disengaged, but such attitude may be related to personal and cultural preferences and interpreted differently across disciplines (Zepke, 2014). There may be an orthodoxy of student engagement that sees quiet, private, non-verbal and non-observable practices as deviant and in need of remediation (Gourlay, 2015).

An engaging pedagogy in HE should find ways of accommodating outside influences since many students study part time and expect study to fit their lives, rather than the reverse (Zepke, 2013). Nevertheless, many authors (Bryson & Hand, 2007; Dean & Jolly, 2012; Kahn, 2014) emphasize the non-applicability of universal pedagogical solutions since the differences among the students and the diversity and complexity of learning prevent the use of generalised models. For instance, initiatives that challenged students who positioned themselves as passive recipients of knowledge by implementing constructivist dialogic approaches recognized the fine line that exists between taking the students out of their comfort zones and out of the class altogether. Participating in a more active way could be challenging, frightening and seen as more entertaining than learning (Masika & Jones, 2016; Richards & Richards, 2013).

Considering the importance of how HE students understand and assess their own engagement, this paper presents the results of qualitative research analysing 46 self-evaluations of undergraduate Pedagogy students from two different courses at a Spanish university. The goals were to identify a) what the students considered as signs of and reasons for their engagement, b) how the students related their engagement to the teacher’s methods, and c) how the students related their learning to their engagement and the teacher’s methods.

Method

Two groups of undergraduate Pedagogy students from a Spanish university took part in this research. The first group took a course that was basically about diversity and inclusive education. The second group took a course that studied definitions of diagnosis in education, its tools and some basic principles of counselling in education. By the end of the term, the students were asked to write a self-evaluation of their learning and engagement. They were asked to critically assess what they learned, how they changed, and how they engaged with the course. Evaluating the teacher’s methods and the course’s contents was optional. Finally, they were asked to assign themselves a numeric grade that would constitute 10% of their final grade and would have to be reasonably coherent with the text that preceded it. The teacher told them he would individually comment on each self-evaluation, but would not comment or change the self-attributed grade. The students from both courses who had completed a self-evaluation received an e-mail that explained the research and asked for their consent to analyse their evaluation. The general acceptance rate was 52.9% (46), 52.6% for the first group and 53.3% for the second group. Following the patterns repeated by the students and the theoretical relevance of each pattern, a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) produced seven themes: 1) expectations and first impressions related to the course; 2) what they learned and how they changed during and thanks to the course; 3) evolution, evidences and causes of their engagement; 4) comments and appraisals about the course’s contents, teaching and evaluation methods; 5) comments about their grades; 6) statements about their relationships; and 7) general statements about their preferences, identities and how they usually study and work. Although only two categories (2 and 3) were directly about learning and engagement, the other five were related. For instance, categories 4 and 7 were used to explain why and how they learned and engaged.

Expected Outcomes

Engagement was described as actions related to the course, including asking questions, participating in the debates, and doing the required tasks. Personal traits (e.g., shyness) were used to justify different forms of engaging in class (e.g., drawing while listening to the teacher). The reasons for engaging could be reduced to a match between the teacher’s methods and their personal preferences. Understanding the teacher’s expectations and goals helped them to decide whether to engage or not and how. None of the evaluations included a rationale for lack of engagement, but some compared their lack of engagement in some activities with their engagement in other activities (e.g., keeping silent during the debates, but reading the course’s texts at home). Engagement was basically thought to help learning, but a few students thought that greater engagement followed learning. The teacher’s methods were mostly praised by the students, but there was a distinction between the ones who enjoyed the group discussions and the ones who wished for more lectures, and fewer debates. The latter complained about repetitively discussing the same themes and some felt a loss of control in the debates. Although the teacher’s democratic attitude was praised by the students who saw themselves as actively taking part in the course, their engagement seemed always a response to the teacher’s proposal and not something that was built together. Though some complained about the amount of work and their grades, the explicit relation between the amount of effort and the grades obtained was explicit just in a few cases. Even so, there was not an explicit students’ academic capitalism attitude (Baron & Corbin, 2012). The results confirm Gourlay’s (2015) criticisms against what is considered as legitimate engagement and show that there is more to engaging pedagogies than entertaining the students (Robinson, 2012) or making them talk.

References

Baron, P. & Corbin, L. (2012). Student engagement: rhetoric and reality. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(6), 759-772. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2012.655711 Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77-101. Bryson, C. & Hand, L. (2007). The role of engagement in inspiring teaching and learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 44(4), 349-362, DOI: 10.1080/14703290701602748 Dean, K. L., & Jolly, J. P. (2012). Student identity, disengagement, and learning. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 11(1), 1-42. Gourlay, L. (2015) ‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 402-411, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1020784 Harper, S. R. & Quaye, S. J. (2009). Beyond sameness, with engagement and outcomes for all: an introduction. In S. R. Harper & S. J. Quaye (Eds.) Student engagement in Higher Education: theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for diverse populations (pp.1-16). New York: Routledge. Hu, S. (2010). Reconsidering the Relationship Between Student Engagement and Persistence in College. Innovative Higher Education, 36, 97–106 DOI: 10.1007/s10755-010-9158-4 Kahn, P. E. (2014). Theorising student engagement in higher education. British Educational Research Journal, 40(6), 1005–1018. DOI: 10.1002/berj.3121 Masika, R. & Jones, J. (2016). Building student belonging and engagement: insights into higher education students’ experiences of participating and learning together, Teaching in Higher Education, 21:2, 138-150, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1122585 McCormick, A. C. & McClenney, K. (2012). Will these trees ever bear fruit? A response to the special issue on student engagement. The Review of Higher Education, 35(2), 307-333. Richards, R. W. & Richards, L. M. (2013). Sponges do not make their own water: student engagement through dialogue and the development of reflective consciousness. Reflective Practice, 14(6), 774-786, DOI: 10.1080/14623943.2013.836083 Robinson, C. (2012). Student engagement. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 4(2), 94-108 DOI: 10.1108/17581181211273039 Zepke, N. (2013). Threshold concepts and student engagement: revisiting pedagogical content knowledge. Active Learning in Higher Education, 14(2), 97-107. Zepke, N. (2014) Student engagement research in higher education: questioning an academic orthodoxy. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(6), 697-708, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2014.901956 Zepke, N. Leach, L. & Butler, P. (2014) Student engagement: students' and teachers' perceptions. Higher Education Research & Development, 33(2), 386-398, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2013.832160

Author Information

Paulo Padilla-Petry (presenting / submitting)

University of Barcelona

MIDE

Barcelona

Jennifer Vadeboncoeur

The University of British Columbia

Raquel Miño-Puigcercós

University of Barcelona, Spain

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