As many institutions brace for a potential enrollment cliff in higher education, improving student engagement is a viable solution to increase enrollment and retention while enhancing educational value for students. Student engagement strategies work at the institutional, program, and classroom levels to drive interest in their education and boost institutional success. Discover seven effective strategies for engaging students in learning.
How is student engagement defined?
Student engagement is the overall participation, attention, curiosity, interest, and motivation a student has within the classroom. However, increasing engagement relies on more than just student willpower.
Instructors have a massive role in developing meaningful engagement with their students. Teaching faculty, administrators, and other adults must cultivate a supportive and stimulating environment. Faculty must model engagement to create a positive culture that keeps students motivated.
Driving engagement involves more than just getting students to refocus. It’s about delivering value through the student’s relationships with their community, leaders, peers, instruction, and curriculum.
Types of engagement
Engagement is affected by numerous influences within a student’s life, including their learning experience, emotional and mental well-being, physical health, financial circumstances, and external responsibilities.
Within a classroom, student engagement falls into three distinct categories:
- Cognitive: Students actively trying to decipher and understand the complex ideas lecturers present to them in class display cognitive engagement. Asking for clarification and using strategies to learn the information shows their mental effort in class.
- Emotional: This type of engagement involves a student’s positive or negative thoughts and feelings regarding their time in the classroom. They need to feel excited about what they’re doing, which gives them a reason to invest their time and energy into their work.
- Behavioral: Behavioral engagement focuses on a student’s participation in their classes. Answering questions, taking notes, and even attending class are active responses to their education.
Why is student engagement important?
Increasing student engagement entails supporting students to achieve learning outcomes and assisting the institution with meeting its goals.
Increasingly, higher education institutions are wondering how to increase student engagement on campus. The economic impact of student dropout looms large. Educators and administrators must look for new solutions to distractions, a lack of participation, and the repercussions of lost tuition. Increasing student engagement turns these scenarios around by supporting students to achieve learning outcomes and persist to graduation, helping the institution meet its goals.
Student engagement also impacts learning positively. According to a recent survey of postsecondary students from 13 countries, 88 percent said the quality of faculty played a significant role in student success, while 86 percent reported that engaging classroom content and hands-on learning opportunities were also vital. Engaged students also achieve higher grades and are more likely to complete their courses.
Collecting and assessing engagement data through surveying, interviewing, and observing students helps higher education institutions drive institutional improvement. Educators also have much to gain from this information to understand how to alter their own practice and better satisfy student needs.
7 higher education student engagement strategies
Student engagement strategies are approaches educators and administrators use in curriculum planning and course delivery to spark student investment in learning. Successful strategies range from changing course material to updating old assessment methods. Learn how to improve student engagement with our top seven strategies.
1. Make class time valuable
Designing a classroom experience that offers students valuable information and opportunities can significantly increase engagement. When students feel that their time in the classroom is engaging, challenging, and equipping them to develop new skills, they’ll tackle assignments and opportunities with greater enthusiasm. Making class time more valuable also boosts attendance and degree completion.
One essential component of a class’s value, as students perceive it, is how well their instructor can connect the curriculum to real-world situations. Over half of students enroll in higher education to increase their earning potential with the qualifications they achieve, suggesting career readiness is a top priority.
Make learning processes relevant to the life experiences and career goals of your students by using real-world examples. Courses should include activities that allow students to solve real problems through collaboration and experimentation.
2. Promote interactive learning
Interactive learning is at the core of student engagement. Present course material using multiple methods, including activities that allow students to summarize, reflect on, and apply what they’ve learned.
Building structured communication and collaboration into lesson plans is one way to make learning more interactive. Allowing students to make and share discoveries with others opens new learning opportunities. Encourage student-led learning, giving students time to explore the material independently, ask questions, and discuss information in small groups.
Another effective way to promote interactive learning is through gamification. This method incorporates game-like activities, points, badges, and leaderboards into education. This combination of challenge, fun, and instant feedback can improve student engagement as reflected in participation, performance, and motivation. Effective gamification aligns the game-like rewards with learning outcomes. It ensures that the gamified elements encourage students to achieve course objectives and do not distract from these outcomes.
3. Value student input
The key to understanding engagement is to realize that every student is unique and engages in different ways. Some thrive in large group settings, while others prefer working one-on-one with classmates or alone. Talk to your students to better understand what’s working and not working for them.
Your students have voices, expectations, and opinions. Listen to student feedback about the classroom experience, the value of the program, and concerns about success to make them feel heard. Perform student assessments often to gather insightful feedback. End-of-course evaluations and student satisfaction surveys are a great way to turn student feedback into tangible improvements. Take advantage of that data to address student needs immediately with next steps. You can also use end-of-module and mid-module surveys to determine learning success.
Once you’ve gathered student input, carefully consider it and develop actionable next steps to complete the cycle of engagement. When students feel that their feedback truly makes a difference, they’re more likely to give it consistently and honestly. Assessing feedback also offers administrators a benchmark for measuring your institution’s success and designing future success strategies.
4. Invest in faculty development
Your teaching faculty and support staff are at the front line of student engagement. Equip them to engage students through engagement-centric professional development opportunities. These initiatives could include courses and workshops covering:
- Innovative and interactive teaching methods.
- How to meet the support needs of diverse students.
- The latest developments in educational technology and how to harness them.
Aim to recognize and reward faculty members who seize these opportunities and see improvements in engagement metrics as a result.
5. Collaborate with students on their success
Providing tailored attention to students is one of the best ways to improve engagement. Students need institutional support as they decide on a career path, tackle the challenges of new courses, and prepare to graduate. While your higher education institution may have counselors for this purpose, assessing student data gives you clearer insight into success and helps you devise intervention strategies:
- Use technology to begin the conversation: Go beyond counseling to get data-driven insights about the struggles and successes of your students. Student success software generates advanced reports on student data and sends them to the instructors and administrators who can make a difference.
- Develop guided pathways: Once you have the data, help students on their educational journey with guided pathways for success. Collaborate with students to create action plans for their academic progress.
- Monitor attendance: Attendance tracking gauges student engagement. Monitor attendance to proactively reach out to absent students and determine how to get them back on track.
6. Provide comprehensive support
The support resources available to students are among the top factors affecting engagement in their learning. This is especially true for students facing challenges like financial worries, external responsibilities, or a lack of family support. Some of the most impactful resources for student engagement include:
- Student success coaching
- Academic advising
- Mentorship programs
- Tutoring and writing centers
- Accessibility services
- Child care
- Financial aid
- Social, sporting, and cultural clubs
Student feedback can help you identify gaps in your institution’s support offerings and ensure you meet all essential student needs for maximal engagement.
7. Utilize technology
An excellent strategy for boosting student engagement involves making education more convenient through technology. By implementing technology tools, you meet the students where they are — online. Many students prefer working on their devices, while others enjoy communicating online more than in person. Digital learning can help connect students with the instructor, the content, and one another.
Use technology in these ways to promote engagement in and out of the classroom:
- Encourage engagement on social media: Social media can be an excellent tool for student engagement, provided you follow safety and privacy guidelines. Use social media to create conversations that extend online.
- Take advantage of a learning management system (LMS): Higher education LMS platforms are designed to simplify involvement. Utilize this system by keeping collaborative documents, discussion boards, slides, activities, and supplemental content like videos in your institution’s system. This makes it easy for students to access all the content they need for a course.
Access insights to drive engagement with Watermark
Your higher education institution can implement a range of strategies to improve student engagement. All of these strategies become more efficient and effective when guided by data-driven insights. To optimize student engagement at your institution, try Watermark Student Success & Engagement.
This student support solution can help your institution increase engagement by:
- Integrating with LMS platforms to collate data from every program at your institution.
- Monitoring student success metrics from user-friendly custom dashboards.
- Flagging at-risk students for early intervention based on predictive analytics.
- Facilitating collaboration with students on personalized learning pathways.
- Providing mobile-friendly access to student support, including scheduling and reminders.
Request a demo of Student Success & Engagement today to see how Watermark can help your institution and learners thrive.
