Assessing Student Engagement and Outcomes: Modelling Insights from Australia and Around the World

Abstract

Assessing how students engage and what they know and can do are pressing change frontiers in contemporary higher education. This paper examines large-scale work that has sought to advance the capacity of higher education systems and institutions to engage students through to graduation and ensure they have capabilities required for future study or work. It reviews contexts fuelling the importance of engagement and learning outcomes, reviews two large-scale case studies, and advances a broad model for structuring assessment collaborations that create and deliver new value for higher education. We conclude by discussing implications and opportunities for Chinese higher education and collaborative international partnerships.

The Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Australia

“…The second dimension of the ATM is underpinned by activity , which comprises five stages: anarchic, appreciation, articulation, application, and amalgamation. This dimension reflects a continuum of increasing sophistication in the scope and scale of the relevant activities, which encourages controlled collaboration (Coates & Mahat, 2013).…”

Testing robustness, model fit, and measurement invariance of the Student Engagement Scale in an African university context

“…Recent research and theory has suggested that a conceptually and psychometrically sound measure of student engagement is necessary for the measurement of student engagement (Coates & Mahat, 2014). In previous investigations, both the NSSE and the AUSSE engagement scores have demonstrated adequate reliability and validity evidence for the five-factor model of student engagement based on large-scale datasets (Coates, 2011; Pascarella, Seifert, & Blaich, 2010).…”

“…Research shows that student engagement has an important effect on students’ academic experiences and overall outcome of university education (Coates & Mahat, 2014; Pascarella et al., 2010). Moreover, three decades of evidence suggest that student engagement, that is students dedicating their time and energy to educationally purposeful activities, is a significant predictor of their satisfaction and attainment of multiple educational outcomes of university (Ko, 2011; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005; Wefald & Downey, 2009).…”

The relationships between student engagement and learning outcome in the undergraduate sports science program in Ethiopia

“…The concern of this paper is student engagement in higher education. In fact, a focus on student engagement in higher education research is very important because engagement has shown to be a key contributor to student learning (Coates and Mahat, 2014;Pascarella et al, 2010). Research evidence suggests that student engagement, that is, students dedicating their time and energy to learning purposeful activities, is a significant predictor of their satisfaction and attainment of multiple learning outcomes in higher education (Almarghani and Mijatovic, 2017;Wefald and Downey, 2009).…”