Global Student Engagement

Policy Insights and International Research Perspectives

Hamish Coates, Xi Gao, Fei Guo, Jinghuan Shi, Hamish Coates, Xi Gao, Fei Guo, Jinghuan Shi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032183428
• eBook ISBN: 9781000578195
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Drawing together major global studies from leading researchers, this book presents novel results, ideas, and developments from the world's largest collaborative study of student engagement in higher education. It builds insight into contemporary higher education practice, policy, and research.

The chapters are written by experts who lead student engagement research in nine diverse countries in Asia Pacific, North and South America, Europe and Africa. The book presents analysis, results, benchmark data, and case studies. It deep-dives into research programs, analytical capabilities, empirical situations, and development trajectories. The book updates earlier publications and charts emerging perspectives and development opportunities.

The research contributions are for students of higher education, as well as for policymakers, advisors, and university administrators. Higher education practitioners and leaders around the world will enjoy this book.

Part I Introduction

1 Charting research on student engagement

Hamish Coates, Xi Gao, Alexander C. McCormick, Fei Guo and Jinghuan Shi

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254096-2

Finding paths and activities

As global higher education lacks robust information on student learning, evidence from a large international collaboration on student engagement has an important role to play. Across the globe, higher education faces pressing demands to demonstrate its effectiveness. These demands reflect concerns about cost escalation and related worries about individual and societal return on investment, diminished willingness to accept the presumption of university effectiveness, greater emphasis on the use of data to justify or question government expenditures and the globalisation of the higher education market, a phenomenon that has both expanded the choices that prospective students confront while limiting their basis for making informed choices. The assessment of university effectiveness has proven elusive due to a variety of factors, however, such as the disparate nature of university functions and outputs, diversity of institutional missions, lack of consensus on how to assess earning outcomes and variety of academic programmes.

Today, many higher education systems and institutions have gathered a reasonable body of knowledge regarding their students’ experiences. This has been driven by a general press towards knowing and disseminating more about higher education processes and functions (Coates & Seifert, 2010; Coates, 2017; Hazelkorn, Coates & McCormick, 2018). Formative 1970s research has flourished into major survey programmes, which are run in many dozens of countries with thousands of institutions on a routine basis. Large education and technology firms run platforms which also collect and exploit troves of data. Results are often reported on websites, in various ‘rankings’ and other metrics, and through a variety of stakeholder platforms. Combined, vast amounts of data have been accumulated across many decades and countries. Still, this data is often disparate, limited to a single country or region, or of varying technical quality hence limited inferential utility.

Responding to the imperative to generate generalisable and substantive insights in this area, this book draws on the largest international collaboration yet concerning students’ engagement in higher education. It captures insights from implementations and adaptations of the United States–based National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Coates and McCormick (2014) provided an initial review of this work of particular relevance to student engagement. This book provides an update and extends the envelope of research and practice.

Building on research in the 1970s and 1980s, NSSE was developed in the late 1990s in the United States and has been implemented there since 2000 at more than 1,600 colleges and universities. Over the last decade, NSSE has been adapted for wide-scale implementation in many countries, including Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. Smaller applications have been conducted in Belgium, Colombia, Egypt, Finland, Italy, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia and Sweden, among others. Coates and McCormick (2014), Richardson and Coates (2014) and McCormick, O’Reilly, Marchegiani and Neves (2017) have explored the tapestry of information formed by these activities. In subsequent chapters, researchers leading a selection of the more mature data collections draw on their experiences with hundreds of institutions to build shared insights into how evidence on student engagement serves to improve educational practice.

Creating data involves major work; however, making effective use of data to improve education can be even more complex. With ample data to hand, therefore, researchers in this field now face the grand challenge of joining-up information in educationally meaningful ways and converting information into education enhancement and transformation. Much effort rightly focuses on the ‘class’ or ‘teacher’ level, and an abundance of contributions have been made (e.g. Bryson, 2014; Zhe & Mcnamara, 2018; Tanaka, 2019; Barkley & Major, 2020; Lowe & El Hakim, 2020). Making sense of this information in global contexts remains an especially pressing concern. As noted and detailed elsewhere (Richardson & Coates, 2014), particularly compared to other sub-sectors, higher education still lacks internationally generalisable information on student experiences and outcomes. Collaboration among large-scale student engagement surveys in different countries has an important role to play.

The research presented in this book attempts to address this need. This book presents results and findings from two years of synthesis by more than a dozen experts from several countries and regions. It asserts modest first steps by gathering information on international student engagement survey activities and drawing comparisons. The aim of this research is to first take stock of contemporary international practice, form cross-national information and insights, and identify opportunities and challenges for future collaboration and development. These contributions inform understanding regarding student engagement activities and more fundamentally, help to chart the blueprint of further research, policy and practical development of this useful and informative perspective on higher education’s contribution to student learning and development.

Grounding concepts

For people relatively new to the topic, the concept of ‘student engagement’ brings together two main ideas. First, there is the simple premise undergirded by a long record of research on undergraduate learning and development, that what students do matters. As NSSE founding director George Kuh (2003: 25) puts it, “Decades of studies show that college students learn more when they direct their efforts to a variety of educationally purposeful activities.” This emphasises “students’ involvement with activities and conditions likely to generate learning” (Coates, 2006: 4). But while students are ultimately responsible for constructing knowledge, learning also depends on institutions and their staff generating conditions that stimulate and encourage involvement (McCormick, Kinzie & Gonyea, 2013). Second, therefore, is a focus on “the policies and practices that institutions use to induce students to take part in these activities” (Kuh, 2003: 24).

Student engagement weaves together insights from several related theoretical traditions stretching back to the 1930s, as well as an influential set of practice-focused recommendations for good practice in undergraduate education (McCormick, Kinzie & Gonyea, 2013). While once viewed narrowly in terms of ‘time on task’, contemporary treatments touch on aspects of teaching, the broader student experience, learners’ lives beyond university and institutional support. Students always lie at the heart of conversations about student engagement. These conversations focus squarely on the conditions and experiences that enhance individual learning and development.

The broader concept of student engagement provides a practical lens for assessing and responding to the significant dynamics, constraints and opportunities facing higher education institutions. For instance, capturing data on student engagement can enhance knowledge about learning processes and furnish nuanced and useful diagnostic measures for learning enhancement activities. As the subsequent chapters make clear, these data provide a useful source of insights into what students are actually doing, a framework for meaningful conversations about excellence and a stimulus for guiding new thinking about good practice.

Building large external data collections that probe, some might say ‘expose’, significant facets of education is always controversial. One signal that something ‘matters’ is that it arouses debate, concern and even resistance. As in any change effort, particularly those which involve complex empirical techniques, it is imperative to listen and engage with critique and, as with the quality cycle itself, respond in ways that steer change and improvement. Over two decades NSSE and its international adaptations have prompted debate about the merits and validity of data. In several areas, the innovative nature of the collections explored in this book has shaken foundations, called assumptions into question, and stimulated new critiques. When surveys present surprising and disappointing results, for instance, questions can be raised about the reliability of students’ survey responses. Some critics have misinterpreted the focus on student engagement as representing a shift away from academic rigour towards student-centred pedagogies and extracurricular involvement and support. Others have asserted that aggregate institutional results cannot accurately reflect the experience of their own students. But such complaints have faded when repeated administrations confirmed the initial findings, or when other evidence buttressed the survey findings. Unlike public rankings, the NSSE suite of surveys has been designed to fuel improvement, leading to concerns about institutional disclosure and transparency. These are explored in the chapters that follow.

Introducing the contributions

This book continues in three more parts and eleven chapters. The text is structured loosely in alignment with continuous quality improvement perspectives which move from planning, to application and review, to improvement. They are also structured to help engage with these global contributions.

The second chapter in this introductory part sketches the development of the research field, and tiptoes into presenting synthesised findings across selected data collections. These two contributions are designed to position and provoke the discussions which follow.

The second part includes contributions which focus mainly on large-scale student engagement survey development and research. This includes a thoughtful chapter on the development and application of the China College Student Survey (CCSS), focusing in particular on its growth beyond the NSSE model from the United States, the broad array of research it has spawned and growing implications for policy. This is followed by a chapter on the Korea-National Survey of Student Engagement (K-NSSE). This delves into the historical development of K-NSSE and current issues, and examines practical and theoretical contributions for improving quality. The final chapter in this second part focuses on the adaptation of the NSSE in the Chilean higher education context. This thoughtful chapter takes a sociological perspective, tracing backwards through the steps and interpretations that have been instilled into the Chilean ENCE survey.

The third part concentrates on four case studies. One chapter unpacks the UK Engagement Survey (UKES). It concentrates on how this survey explores trends in student engagement with learning, and considers many relationships between engagement, skills development and extra-curricular activity. The following chapter also presents a broad view, drawing from the Irish Survey of Student Engagement (‘StudentSurvey.ie’) to present systemwide insights and then delves into variations in engagement due to the pandemic and associated policy implications. Drawing from the South African Survey of Student Engagement (SASSE), the third chapter in this part presents macro-level insights before probing what the survey data reveals about university engagement and work. It advances an improvement science approach, and with reference to an institutional case study shows how structured and scaled practices can enhance student success. The final chapter in this...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the editors
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Development and research
• Part III Case study contexts
• Part IV Applications and offshoots
• Index