Measuring Student Engagement and Participation

By Ann Damiano with Elizabeth Threadgill

I remember reading an assessment report years ago in which the department faculty wrote, “Most of the students met expectations for this goal, and those that did not were just lazy and didn’t study.” 

Few declarations make an assessment committee’s eyes roll more than a statement like that.  From the very beginning, proponents of assessment made learning a shared responsibility between instructor and student, and the ultimate purpose of assessment was to inform continuous improvement.  Blaming students for poor learning outcomes is antithetical to the very principles advanced by the assessment movement.

And yet, the fact remains that there are students who do not actively engage in their learning, who miss numerous classes or habitually arrive late, who often neglect to complete assignments, who do not prepare for exams with the intensity required, and who spend more class time scrolling through their phones than attending to the lecture or discussion. 

To interpret student learning assessment results without giving some consideration to student engagement may be to miss if not the whole point, then at least an important part of the narrative. So argued prominent members of the English faculty last fall.   

So when the department assembled in February to discuss assessment findings for both their majors and core courses, they also conferred on how they might include evidence of student participation and engagement in future assessments.  
 

A small group of us met to review various checklists, rubrics, and protocols that measure student participation and engagement, and after a lively conversation, the faculty selected criteria they thought best reflected how they would determine whether or not a student is appropriately engaged in a course.  One member observed, “We talk about student engagement all the time, but we haven’t defined what it is and we haven’t systematically measured it”—even though many of these faculty make participation part of the students’ final grade.

The plan is to assess each student’s participation/engagement according to the selected criteria.  This assessment aims to answer a number of questions raised by the faculty.  How might measuring student engagement better help us understand student success in our courses?  Is a lack of engagement more prevalent in Core courses than in courses designed for the major?  Are we inclined to overstate a lack of student engagement in our courses? How might the results of this assessment help us better understand the results gathered from course-embedded assessments? 

The scholarship of teaching and learning offers countless examples and studies describing how active student participation and engagement improves learning.  This is obvious to anyone who ever stood before a group of students.  The work being done by the English faculty has the potential to document the extent to which this might be true.