The state of the art in student engagement

There has been a considerable shift in the higher education literature from a focus on the characteristics and traits of individual students to the role of the learning environment. More than ever, the context in which learning takes place has come to the fore and the role of lecturers in helping to facilitate learning and to engage students across a wide diversity of learning contexts is of upmost importance. To this end, learning is relational, which involves the development and quality of relationships between students and lecturers but also the relationships between students themselves (see Gergen, 2011). The empirical evidence is encouraging as it demonstrates that students who learn collaboratively achieve higher grades than students working independently. The challenge for programme managers is to move beyond the prescriptive view that learning only takes place at an individual level within the lecture theater, seminar or tutorial room and explore the wider sets of relationships and communities in which students are situated within (Singh, 2003; Garrison and Vaughan, 2008). Students come to higher education institutions already engaged in a wider set of relationships (e.g., family, employment, and organizations) and will develop new ones through their studies which need to be understood in order to engage students with innovative program design and delivery. This research topic was born out of this need and collects together a range of perspectives that converge on one salient question i.e., by what means can we further engage students in their studies? This research topic is both innovative and ambitious and highlights as well as consolidates the current understanding of the role that student based engagement behaviors may serve in effective pedagogy. Of the nine papers submitted six were platform articles that highlighted an existing agenda or set a further direction for new lines of work. The very fact that so many opinion articles were submitted to this topic perhaps highlight the need for more empirical work in this area. In a highly original article, Irving (2015) describes her work on the use of dance to engage students with the development of statistical literacy. Research methods and statistics are traditionally viewed as difficult topics by undergraduate psychology students and many fail to engage due to the (miss) perceived difficulty that they may encounter (Onwuegbuzie and Wilson, 2010). However, by communicating statistical concepts via the medium of dance Irving argues that students can be more readily engaged within this …