Measuring Student Engagement – SBE Pedagogic Research Seminar
The School of Business and Economics (SBE) is organising a pedagogic seminar on Wednesday, 9 October 2013, from 3:30pm to 5pm entitled “Measuring Student Engagement: Current trends and perspectives from research in Education and Psychology” to which colleagues are invited to attend.
Led by Claire Kinsella (Department of Psychology, Edge Hill University), this seminar will focus on practical implications of the model discussed for practitioners who are seeking to assess and enhance student engagement as part of their everyday teaching practice; it will also highlight some tools currently available for researchers seeking to investigate engagement in a higher education environment. Thus, both researchers and practitioners may find this useful.
Could colleagues interested in attending please contact the organiser Marjahan Begum (SBE Learning and Teaching Facilitator) – click here for further details; more information regarding the seminar follows below:
The active engagement of students in the learning process is widely regarded to exert a positive influence on a variety of educational outcomes including students’ personal development, skills acquisition, academic performance and general participation in scholarly activity. Nevertheless, how exactly educational engagement can be encouraged, measured and sustained remains a key challenge for practitioners teaching in a university context. In the field of psychology, the notion of engagement has crystallized into a number of relatively autonomous schools of thought such as Finn’s (1992) Participation-Identification model; Deci and Ryan’s (1991) Self-Determination theory; and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) theory of Flow. More recently, however, in an attempt to develop a more integrated yet comprehensive view on this phenomenon, a number of researchers have attempted to bring together the various cognitive, behavioural and affective factors which are believed to underlie engagement and statistically examine these factors using large sets of quantitative data. However, given the broad scope and large-scale nature of this research, it often falls short of providing examples of insights at work in lessons with sufficient detail to enable teachers to make a connection with their own, largely implicit, knowledge and skills as well as the more complex and dilemma-ridden nature of their own particular teaching environment. With these limitations in mind, this seminar presents an analytical framework which has been specifically devised to incorporate a broader consideration of the contextual factors that are necessary for case-study research and can be readily adapted for research on student engagement in a university context. In addition, the practical implications of this model will be considered for practitioners’ seeking to assess and enhance student engagement as part of their everyday teaching practice as well as highlighting some tools currently available for researchers seeking to investigate engagement in a higher education environment.
As part of her PhD research in the Department of Psychology at Edge Hill University, Claire is currently investigating ways to enhance the educational engagement of a group of young people who are attending a Pupil Referral Unit in the North West. In order to investigate the conditions under which these young people become more engaged in learning, the research is examining the views, experiences and attitudes of pupils in relation to how they spend their time in the school classroom and comparing this to how they spend their time in museum, gallery and informal education settings.