It’s the age-old question. How do you measure student engagement with their studies? The traditional answer has been – you see if they are attending class.
Whilst attendance is certainly a factor in engagement, and there are long established links between attending class and being successful, it only tells part of the story. In this blog we will look at the part it plays and some of the other things that should be considered to get a true reflection of how a student is learning and if they are on the path to success.
We all know about the challenges we faced during the pandemic and lockdown as we had to pivot quickly to new methods of teaching, learning and working and whilst there have also been advantages (being able to wear slippers during meetings is one of my personal highlights), this remote life has made many of us completely rethink our views on what student engagement means.
I’ve been working in Higher Ed and Edtech for over two decades and I can vividly remember conversations about flipped and blended learning stretching back more than 15 years. At that time, I was working in Learning Accommodation and the discussions were around how teaching space could evolve to meet the needs of future students. I don’t think any of us thought at that point that students would be forced into a situation where they would study entire semesters from their own homes but that’s exactly what happened, and we could no longer take for granted that attending classes was the gold standard for engagement. Realistically this had probably been the case for much longer, as the expectations of what successful study entails had started to change, but the pandemic threw it into sharp focus as students had to manage even more complicated and varied life pressures than before.
This is why looking at engagement in a much broader context can give a truer indication of how a student is doing and if they are likely to progress. Let’s have a look at some examples below.
Imagine we have two students – student A who attends all of their in person classes and student B who does not. If we were only looking at their attendance record, we would logically conclude that student B is the most at risk of not progressing through their studies. However, looking at the broader context of engagement we see a different picture emerge. Although student B is not attending class in person, they are frequently accessing recordings of their lectures and regularly using the Virtual Learning Environment. They have submitted all of their assessments on time and are receiving good grades. Student A on the other hand is not accessing any digital resources, such as the VLE and have been late submitting their assessments so with this insight we might then conclude that it is student A who is less likely to progress.
It is because of this that many institutions are moving away from having a pure attendance policy, and instead moving more to focus on a more holistic view of engagement, taking into account all aspects academic life, some are even considering engagement beyond the academic sphere.
University of Essex is one such example. Their thinking behind this has been that whilst measuring attendance is important and easy to understand, it only gives a limited view and often comes with hidden issues (student & staff resistance is commonplace)
By measuring a wider range of engagement touch points that includes attendance data they now have a more complete view of how their students are interacting on their courses.
They have even been able to evidence that at the 6-week point it is possible to identify their students that are at risk of withdrawal. In fact, they found that 88% of students in the “very low” engagement category (as defined by the StREAM algorithms) fail to progress to the next year of study.
The world is returning to something approaching ‘normal’ and students are being welcomed back onto campus where the focus is once again orientating towards attendance (as this is assumed to be the ‘gold standard’ of what constitutes engagement).
However, this is a narrow view especially as not all students are choosing to return. Whether this is a longer-term switch to a more flexible learning experience remains to be seen, but it does seem that there needs to be options beyond simply attending in person classes to meet the expectations of students.
As students become much more discerning about what they want when they come to campus (as shown in this blog post by Ed Foster from Nottingham Trent University) it is likely that the diversity of what we see as student engagement is only going to grow and change.
Whilst trying to answer this eternal question of attendance vs engagement I’ve also been thinking about some of the wider context. Things like –
I don’t have the answers to these, but I’d love to hear your thoughts, so reach out to me if you would like to discuss and we will return to this in future blogs. For now though, I think attendance and engagement is intrinsically linked but only because attendance is a facet of learning and it is only by bringing all the data points together that we see a true picture.
To see how StREAM can help you understand what engagement looks like for your university book a demo today.
Author – Jackie Sherlock, Product Marketing Manager It’s the age-old question. How do you measure student engagement with their studies? The traditional answer has been – you see if they are attending class. Whilst attendance is certainly a factor in engagement, and there are long established links between attending class and being successful, it […]
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