Student engagement has become problematic following the rise of mass and universal forms of higher education. Significant attention has been devoted to identifying factors that are associated with higher levels of engagement, but it remains the case that the underlying reasons for student engagement and, indeed, the notion itself of 'student engagement' remain weakly theorised. In this article, we seek to develop the theoretical basis for student engagement in a way that highlights the student's own contribution. We explore how learning involves students taking responsibility for action in the face of uncertainty, whether in pursuit of personal or communal concerns. Drawing on perspectives primarily from realist social theory, we suggest that student engagement may be shaped by extended, restricted and fractured modes of reflexivity and co-reflexivity. In this way student engagement in higher education is theorised as a form of distributed agency, with the impact of a learning environment on this agency mediated by reflexivity. Reflexivity itself is further influenced by the tasks and social relations encountered by students in a given learning environment. The role that social relations play in students' responses to learning specifically offers a means to strengthen the moral basis for education. Our account provides an explanation as to why specific educational practices, such as those termed 'high impact', might lead to higher levels of student engagement within the wider context of a knowledge society. We thus offer insights towards new forms of educational practice and relations that have the potential to engage students more fully. education institutions evidently stand to gain a good deal from any capacity to foster an engaged student body.Research has also begun to identify specific educational practices that are particularly effective in engaging students. Studies using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in the US, for instance, have been able to establish a set of practices that have a high impact on student engagement (Kuh & Schneider, 2008). While such an approach may assist in selecting educational practices, though, it leaves the underlying concept 'student engagement' relatively weakly theorised. Kuh and Schneider (2008), for instance, identified ways in which the level of academic challenge, the presence of active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction and a supportive campus environment contribute to student engagement, but without seeking to theorise how these elements work together to effect gains of various kinds. Such studies tend to emphasise the way in which student engagement is linked to given institutional or student characteristics, but Carini et al. (2006, p. 23) emphasises that only a relatively modest proportion of the variation in learning outcomes can be accounted for through measures of student engagement based on survey instruments. Coates (2006, p. 57) has argued that this framework from Kuh and Schneider (2008) is the most advanced exi...
It is important to develop understanding of what underpins the engagement of students in online learning environments. This article reports on a multiple case study that explored student engagement in a set of postgraduate degrees offered on a fully online basis. The study was based on a theorization of student engagement as the exercise of intentional human action, .or agency. It identified ways in which tasks and social relations in the online learning environments triggered reflexivity on the part of students, with 'reflexivity' understood to mean the ordinary mental capacity to consider oneself in relation to one's social setting. A different relationship between reflexivity and student engagement was in view than that identified by Margaret Archer with regard to reflexivity and social mobility. Rather than displaying one dominant mode of reflexivity, the students considered in the study were seen to draw on a range of modes. The engagement of these students in their learning was also seen to depend on the manner in which they engaged in reflexivity centred on the pursuit of shared goals, that is in collective reflexivity. Specific practices were seen to trigger constructive forms of collective reflexivity, while fractured and restricted forms of collective reflexivity were linked to student disengagement in relation to joint tasks. As well as adverting to the importance of collective reflexivity to learning, the study highlights scope for dissonance between the modes of reflexivity and practices favoured by an online learning environment and the reflexive profile of the student.
This paper presents the results of an interview‐based study of the use of virtual learning environments (VLEs) among dyslexic students. Interviews were carried out with 12 informants who had been formally diagnosed as dyslexic. The informants were either enrolled in a university or college programme, or had graduated less than a year before the interview. The findings reveal that dyslexic students experience a number of challenges associated with VLE use, including information overload, imperfect word processing tools, inadequate search functions, and having to relate to more than one system at a time.
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