Sometimes, Faculty Matter: The Contribution of Faculty Support to Future Engagement

Abstract

Prof. Melani Plett is a Professor in Electrical Engineering at Seattle Pacific University. She has over seventeen years of experience in teaching a variety of engineering undergraduate students (freshman through senior) and has participated in several engineering education research projects, with a focus how faculty can best facilitate student learning. Sometimes, Faculty Matter: The Contribution of Faculty Support to Future Engagement AbstractIn this study, we examine the contribution of student-faculty interactions to the future engagement of students in their academic endeavors. These relationships were evaluated in a one-year longitudinal study of STEM (including engineering and computer science) students at five different institutions. These five institutions include three types of Carnegie 2010 classifications (Bac-Diverse, Master's L, and RU-VH), four geographical locations including the northwest, northeast, midwest, and southeast, and both public and private institutions with total undergraduate enrollments varying from 1,900 to 29,000 students. Both behavioral (effort, participation) and emotional (positive, negative) aspects of engagement are studied. Results show that significant relationships emerged for three of the five schools between faculty support and engagement. Formal faculty support (that provided in the context of a particular course) predicted effort (a form of behavioral engagement) at the HBCU in this study and also positive emotional engagement for both the HBCU and Teaching institution. Informal faculty support (that provided outside the context of a particular course) predicted participation (another form of behavioral engagement) and positive emotional engagement at the Research institution in the study. These results suggest that institutional culture influences how what faculty do predicts future engagement outcomes for students. At the Research institution, it appears that what happens between faculty and students outside of class influences students while at smaller or teaching-oriented institutions, what faculty do inside a class matters more. These results can provide important insight to faculty as to how to guide their interactions with students at different institutions to make the most difference in students' academic lives.

Faculty support and student engagement in undergraduate engineering

“…The dependent variables used in this analysis (Table 1) were based on two behavioral forms of engagement (attention and effort) and two emotional forms of engagement (positive and negative) using items that were adapted for use in higher education (Wilson et al, 2015) from previous studies in K-12 (Miserandino, 1996). All engagement items were assessed using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).…”

“…In engineering, student satisfaction with faculty availability and the quality of instruction and advice was found to be negatively correlated with students being disengaged across a broad range of engineering majors at four different institutions (Chen et al, 2008). And, over time, general perceptions of faculty support across multiple courses predicted behavioral and emotional engagement at smaller, teaching-oriented institutions but not at large research institutions (Wilson et al, 2014). While this research reinforces the importance of faculty support in the student experience, relatively little is known about how different demographic populations, particularly under-represented groups, may perceive and respond differently to such support.…”

The Role of Teaching Assistants and Faculty in Student Engagement

“…sessions. This result is consistent with faculty-based studies that have demonstrated significant links between engagement (or alternatively reduced disengagement) and teaching quality [10], teacher's use of student-centered teaching techniques [8], teacher availability [10], and overall course support [9]. In this study where faculty and TAs were studied as individual participants in the teaching process, the emergence of TA support as a distinct predictor of engagement is noteworthy and speaks to the unique importance of what TAs do to facilitate student engagement and achievement.…”

“…For example, Umbach & Wawrzynski [8] demonstrated that in a large multi-institutional sample of over 22,000 students, students reported higher levels of engagement at institutions where faculty tended to use active and collaborative learning techniques and also challenged students academically. In a study that focused on behavioral and emotional engagement rather than on more traditional measures of engagement associated with what students do, longitudinal data across five institutions demonstrated mixed results with formal, course-related faculty support in STEM disciplines predicting positive emotional engagement and behavioral effort at smaller, teaching-oriented institutions but not at larger research institutions [9]. In engineering, student satisfaction with faculty availability and the quality of instruction and advising was found to be negatively correlated with student disengagement across a broad range of engineering majors at four different institutions [10].…”

Improving Student Engagement in Engineering Classrooms: The First Step toward a Course Delivery Framework using Brain-based Learning Techniques

“…This is especially true in teaching focused schools such as Tuskegee University 31,32 . The way teacher behaves in classroom and his/her communication ability plays a crucial role in the engagement of students 8 .…”