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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 9 SEPTEMBER, 2018
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
In a published interview,
author and professor, Robert E.
Quinn describes his observations of teaching at a higher
education institution (HEI).
“I taught on a university campus where the main
building was constructed with long rows of classrooms
and each one had a big window. As I walked along I could
look in on each class …As I passed the classes, I would ask
myself what was happening in each one. I never had to look
at what the teacher was doing. All I had to do was look at
the body language of the students … In the majority of the
classes, the students were draped over their desks, only half
awake,” he said.
Such apparentlywithdrawn studentsmay be detrimental
to a HEI’s service and its survivability given the increasingly
competitive market.
The competition between HEIs for students means
that students are becoming more like ‘customers’ of the
institutions’ service. Historically, service quality and higher
education seemed about as compatible as oil and water.
Students are now more savvy and selective in their choice
of a HEI, often relying on university rankings (The UWI
recently ranked 37th among universities in the Caribbean
and Latin America).
This change, accompanied by shifting socio-economic
conditions such as globalization, withdrawal of funding for
education, and emphasis on graduation rates, means that
HEIs must transition towards a service quality mentality
in order to attract students. If students become dissatisfied,
enrolment figures can fall and this in turn can negatively
influence funding and job security.
In a race to provide the best student ‘experience’, the
term ‘student engagement’ has captured the spotlight in the
HEI context. Despite the popularity of student engagement,
there is surprisingly little regard for its meaning. In fact,
educational researchers explicitly acknowledge that there
is considerable ambiguity with respect to the definition
and scope of student engagement. For instance, student
engagement has often been defined according to its
measurement by popular student engagement surveys such
as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) used
in Canada and the US.
The NSSE contains questions such as, ‘During the
current school year, how often have you had discussions
with … people with religious beliefs other than your own?’
The approach of using such wide-ranging scope of questions
to conceptualize student engagement is counterintuitive to
the theoretical development of student engagement because
(1) operational definitions follow conceptualizations in
scientific research and not the other way around, and
(2) student engagement becomes an all-encompassing
construct riddled with ambiguity and fuzziness. Evidently,
there is a need to clearly outline what constitutes student
engagement.
One approach to conceptualizing student engagement
is to adopt the conceptual features of engagement from the
organizational behaviour discipline. Within this discipline,
the concept of engagement has matured more than in the
education discipline by focusing on what it means to be
‘engaged’. Borrowing from organizational behaviour, the
scope of student engagement can be narrowed so that
engagement is characterized by high levels of activation.
The idea that student engagement can be characterized
by activation is not completely new. In the early 1990s,
educational researchers distinguished between two types
of engagement – procedural and substantive. Procedural
engagement is characterized by normal or ‘undistinguished’
activity. Here, students ‘go through the motions’ in order
to develop competence in academic activities. In contrast,
substantive engagement transcends procedural engagement,
and is characterized by meaningful and highly energetic
activity. From this perspective, there is a clear similarity
between substantive student engagement and the concept of
work engagement from organizational behaviour research.
Both (1) the concept of substantive student engagement
and (2) empirical studies using work engagement measures
adapted for the HEI context, emphasize high activation
for engagement. Accordingly, the eclectic concept of
student engagement in extant educational research needs
to shed its procedural aspects in order to have value as
a distinct concept that would be aligned with the latest
developments in organizational behaviour approaches to
engagement. In this view, student engagement refers to
highly activated emotional (passionate feelings and beliefs),
behavioral (demonstrations of initiative, proactivity, and/
or innovation), and cognitive (deeply immersed and
focused) involvement in academic activities.This definition
of student engagement describes a state of activation that
surpasses student satiation/satisfaction and evenmotivation.
Following this definition, researchers and practitioners
should consider using recently adapted measures of
engagement from organizational behaviour research that
capture the activated state of student engagement.
Dr. Paul Balwant is a lecturer in OB & HRM at the Department of Management Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, UWI St. Augustine. This article is
based on his publications in the Journal of Further and Higher Education, which can be read online (
and
or at Paul’s personal webpage (
/).
TheCampusOffice of Planning and Institutional
Research
regularly administers a survey targeting
incoming students that seeks socio-economic
demographic information on them. The key
findings of the most recent survey, done in 2016,
are outlined in the points below. One of the main
findings was that a large part of our student
population comes from middle to low income
backgrounds and are first-generation UWI
students – the first in their families.
• In terms of the socio-economic profile
of respondents, approximately 49.5%
of respondents came from households
earning $15000 or less monthly, with 40%
of respondents also being first generation
university students. It was noted that for those
who had family members who were pursuing
or had pursued tertiary level education,
approximately half of them had attended or
were attending UWI.
• UWI was a first choice institution for
approximately 1 out 2 respondents and this is
likely to be attributed to the fact that financial
assistance (GATE) was provided and also
that they perceived UWI St Augustine to be
an institution which had a good academic
reputation.
• In respect of student pre-university activities,
survey results indicated that most respondents
spent more time on academic work and using
social media platforms and were less inclined
to participate in extracurricular activities on
a regular basis.
• Respondents indicated that they would want
to participate in non-academic activities or
extra-curricular activities at The UWI, such
as student clubs/organisations/activities,
participating in internships and taking co-
curricular courses. More specifically, it was
noted that respondents who were more
interested in participating in non-academic
activities at The UWI, were also more likely
to have had pre-university experiences such
as participation in in-class and extracurricular
activities, and also perceived themselves as
possessing leadership skills.
• Respondents who were inclined to look
forward to in-class participation at The UWI
were more likely to have higher scores with
respect to leadership skills, writing, thinking
and communication skills, pre-university in
class participation and study habits.
• Respondents with higher cumulative GPA
scores corresponded with higher scores
for attributes such as study habits and pre-
university in-class participation but was
negatively correlated with non-academic
activities.
• Respondents anticipated that they would
encounter challenges with time management
as well as keeping up with academic work but
were looking forward to completing their
degree and maintaining a good GPA.
Source: UWI Incoming Students Survey, 2016
Howdo you
make them
COME
ALIVE?
B Y P A U L B A L W A N T
WHAT
STUDENTS
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