Defining Student Engagement at Your School

Student engagement has been an intensely debated topic among higher education leaders, practitioners, and researchers for years — and rightly so. According to Dr. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Higher Education at Indiana University,

“Student engagement is no longer a buzzword. It’s part of the lexicon in higher education.”

Creating your institution’s own definition of student engagement is the first step to establishing an engagement strategy that will yield positive outcomes for your school and your students. As many institutions are asked to achieve greater outcomes with fewer resources, understanding the best ways to engage your students can save you from spending time and money on strategies and tools that may not work for your campus.

To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of four questions you should ask as you define student engagement at your school:

1. What does student engagement mean to us?

2. Who is responsible for student engagement?

3. What are our goals for student engagement?

4. How will we measure student engagement?

Asking these four questions is a great starting point for any institution looking to establish or refine its student engagement strategy. Keep reading to learn more about each question and what it can reveal about student engagement at your school.

1. What does student engagement mean to us?

This may seem like a simple question, but it’s one that can elicit a variety of answers, depending on who you ask. To get started, gather a group of diverse stakeholders — including administrators, faculty members, staff members, and students — and ask them this question. You may be surprised by the range of responses you receive. Once everyone has had a chance to weigh in, start synthesizing the answers into a working definition of student engagement that everyone can agree on.

2. Who is responsible for student engagement?

A key component of any successful student engagement strategy is buy-in from everyone on campus — from the president and provost all the way down to individual faculty members and support staff members. To ensure that everyone understands their role in supporting student success, clearly define who is responsible for student engagement at your institution. This will help ensure that everyone is working together towards the same goal: providing an engaging experience for every single student on campus.

3. What are our goals for student engagement?

As with anything in life, you can’t achieve what you don’t set out to achieve — so setting goals is an essential part of any successful student engagement strategy. But what should those goals be? Start by taking a look at your institution’s mission statement and strategic plan; these documents can provide insight into where your school wants to be in the future and how student engagement can help you get there. Once you have a general idea of what your goals should be, start getting specific by setting measurable objectives that you can track over time. Doing so will help ensure that your efforts are actually moving the needle when it comes to student success.  

4. How will we measure student engagement?

Measuring progress towards your goals is essential to determining whether or not your efforts are actually paying off — but it can also be one of the most challenging aspects of defining student engagement at your school . There are a number of different ways to measurestudentengagement , but some common metrics include things like first-year retention rates , course completion rates , and graduation rates . No matter which metrics you choose to focus on , make sure they align with your overall goals forstudentengagement ; doing so will ensure that you’re collecting data that tells a story about how well your efforts are working .

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