Student engagement

Student engagement represents both the time and energy students invest in educationally purposeful activities (either academic and/or co-curricular) and the effort institutions devote to using effective educational practices. Looking at the definition, I have a strange feeling that the student engagement level at my faculty is quite low. This is because:

i) Every now and then I will hear grouses from fellow lecturers about their students’ performance and/or attitude in their courses. This state of affairs has escalated over the years almost in tandem with the efforts in designing new ways of instruction (problem based learning, outcome based learning etc.etc). The adage “ you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink” always comes to my mind whenever I got to think about students and their lacklustre performance in my courses (and I am not referring to grades only!).

ii) The lack of interest amongst faculty members to get involved in student development activities, especially those that do not have the relevant “KPI points”. And even if they do get involved they are constantly thinking about ways and means of converting it into KPIs!

Research has indicated that low student engagement leads to low performance. This brings to mind the issue of significant learning and its role in student engagement. In his book Fink (2003) iterates that if we want better (significant) student learning, we will require better teaching, faculty’s ability to learn about teaching and also better institutional support (which include a suitable appraisal system). Fink and Ok (2010) also produced a new interactive taxonomy called the significant learning taxonomy which is different from Bloom taxonomy which is hierarchical in nature. In the significant learning taxonomy it is interesting to note that Fink and Ok (2010) incorporates and provides a means for the students and instructors to articulate the value aspects of learning which is obviously absent in the Bloom’s taxonomy. Perhaps if we can adopt this new taxonomy it will create new opportunities for higher student engagement.



L. Dee Fink &Norman, OK (2010): Designing Our Courses for Greater Student Engagement and Better Student Learning

Fink (2003): Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses