Post Grad Pt2: W5 Engagement, Data, and Evidence

Gathering Data and Evidence to Support Engagement 

Whakataukī

Nā te whakarongo me te titiro ka puta mai te kōrero.  

Through looking and listening, we gain wisdom.

Insights

What Data?

Data can help empower all of us: including us as Educators, Parents, Policy Makers and Students.

There are many forms of data that we can collect:

Tests/Quizzes

Annual Assessment

Benchmark Assessment

Data can be gathered in different ways e.g. through teacher observations; student engagement; student homework and data through apps.

Data needs to be:

• availabe, complete and relevant 
• safeguarded, trustworthy and private 

Teachers and Adminstrators need to have the knowledge and skills to use the data. In order ot be able to communicate to whanau and the community in order to support and improve learning.

What is Engagement?

The main themes are that engagement is essential for learning, that engagement is multifaceted with behavioral and psychological components, that engagement and disengagement are developmental and occur over a period of years, and that student engagement can be modified through school policies and practices to improve the prognoses of students at risk.

-Finn, J.D., Zimmer, K.S. (2012). Student Engagement: What Is It? Why Does It Matter?. In: Christenson, S., Reschly, A., Wylie, C. (eds) Handbook of Research on Student Engagement. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2018-7_5

Student engagement represents the time and effort students devote to activities that are empirically linked to desired outcomes of college and what institutions do to induce students to participate in these activities (Kuh, 2001, 2003, 2009). The meaning and applications of this definition of student engagement have evolved over time to represent increasingly complex understandings of the relationships between desired outcomes of college and the amount of time and effort students invest in their studies and other educationally purposeful activities (Kuh, 2009; Wolf-Wendel, Ward, & Kinzie, 2009). For example, building on Tyler's "time on task" concept (Merwin, 1969), Pace [End Page 683] (1980, 1984) developed the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) to measure "quality of effort" to identify the activities that contributed to various dimensions of student learning and personal development. His research across three decades (1960 to 1990) showed that students gained more from their studies and other aspects of the college experience when they devoted more time and energy to certain tasks that required more effort than others-studying, interacting with their peers and teachers about substantive matters, applying their learning to concrete situations and tasks in different contexts, and so forth (Pace, 1984, 1990).

- Kuh, G.D. (2009). What Student Affairs Professionals Need to Know About Student Engagement. Journal of College Student Development 50(6), 683-706. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/csd.0.0099.

What Evidence can we gather to indentify Student Engagement?

• 
  Observation
• Attendance
• Lower Scores, participation
• Creating other artefacts
• Social Anxiety

Emotional Engagement includes boredom, sadness, anxiety and belonging

Behaviour Engagement includes persistence

Cognitive Engagement includes investment in learning, challenge, self-regulation, going beyond the learning, and effort in mastering new knowledge and/or skills

Remember, if you're using gaming, not all students are into competition!

Takeaways

AI is a useful tool that can help to analyse gathered information, but is not always accurate or reliable.

Gathering Data, there are lots of methods we are not limited to one method or way!

When doing a survey, do a pre-survey to check the quality of questions.

Reflection

There is nothing wrong with testing out your survey before doing the real attempt. Even when things go wrong, we can analyse them in the research.