Hamish Coates

Students’ engagement in first‐year university

This paper reports on seven calibrated scales of student engagement emerging from a large‐scale study of first year undergraduate students in Australian universities. The analysis presents insights into contemporary undergraduate student engagement, including online, self‐managed, peer and student‐staff engagement. The results point to the imperative for developing a broader understanding of engagement as a process with several dimensions. These must be acknowledged in any measurement and monitoring of this construct in higher education. The paper calls for a more robust theorising of the engagement concept that encompasses both quantitative and qualitative measures. It considers implications for pedagogy and institutional policy in support of enhancing the quality of the student experience.

The value of student engagement for higher education quality assurance

As the principles and practices of quality assurance are further implanted in higher education, methodological questions about how to understand and manage quality become increasingly important. This paper argues that quality assurance determinations need to take account of how and to what extent students engage with activities that are likely to lead to productive learning. The idea of student engagement is introduced. A critical review of current possibilities for determining the quality of university education in Australia exposes limitations of quality assurance systems that fail to take account of student engagement. The review provides a basis for suggesting the broad relevance of student engagement to quality assurance. A sketch is provided of an approach for factoring student engagement data into quality assurance determinations.

A model of online and general campus-based student engagement

Knowing how campus‐based students engage in key online and general learning practices can play a central role in managing and developing university education. Knowledge in this area is limited, however, despite recent advances in student engagement research, and widespread adoption of online learning systems. This paper responds to the need to develop such knowledge, by documenting the development and application of a typological model of online and general campus‐based student engagement. It reports the statistical analyses used to develop the model, and analyses the model’s structure and substance. The model is exemplified by considering what it says about how increasingly powerful and pervasive online technologies might be leveraged to enhance campus‐based student engagement.

Student engagement in campus-based and online education : university connections

chapter one: Engaging students in campus-based online learning chapter two: The idea of student engagement chapter three: Campus-based online education chapter four: Online learning management systems chapter five: A model of student engagement chapter six: Campus-based and online student engagement chapter seven: Leveraging online sytems to enhance engagement chapter eight: Factoring engagement measures into quality assurance chapter nine: Developing learners not users

The Development of an Extended Course Experience Questionnaire

Universities in Australia have been using the course experience questionnaire (CEQ) for a number of years to measure the quality of teaching. Recently, there have been increasing calls for a broader perspective that takes into account the potential of non-classroom context influences on the student learning experience. This project undertook to develop a broader instrument that added a range of scales that could be linked to the existing instrument. A sample of almost 4000 students responded to the trial instrument. The trials suggest that the existing ‘good teaching’, ‘generic skills’, ‘clear goals’, ‘appropriate workload’ and ‘appropriate assessment’ scales can be supplemented by the following additional scales: ‘student support’, ‘learning resources’, ‘learning community’, ‘graduate qualities’ and ‘intellectual motivation’. These new scales were shown through Rasch analyses to be psychometrically reliable and accurate.

Job Satisfaction around the Academic World

Higher education systems have changed all over the world, but not all have changed in the same ways. Although system growth and so-called massification have been worldwide themes, there have been system-specific changes as well. It is these changes that have an important impact on academic work and on the opinions of the staff that work in higher education. The academic profession has a key role to play in producing the next generations of knowledge workers, and this task will be more readily achieved by a contented academic workforce working within well-resourced teaching and research institutions. This volume tells the story of academics’ opinions about the changes in their own countries. The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey has provided researchers and policy makers with the capacity to compare the academic profession around the world. Built around national analyses of the survey this book examines academics’ opinions on a range of issues to do with their job satisfaction. Following an introduction that considers the job satisfaction literature as it relates to higher education, country-based chapters examine aspects of job satisfaction within each country.

Investigating Ten Years of Equity Policy in Australian Higher Education

This paper reports issues arising from a longitudinal study of 1991 to 2002 Australian higher education equity data. The national equity framework uses an empirical performance indicator system to monitor access, participation, success and retention of six designated equity groups. The paper examines three possible approaches for defining new groups. It finds no support for an exploratory empirical approach, or for an approach based on definitions of multiple disadvantage, but supports an approach which takes account of secondary school attendance. A case is made for a more sophisticated and contextualised approach to national reporting, to increase the responsiveness and productivity of the policy framework. While the benefits of a national equity policy framework are acknowledged, the paper proposes possibilities for new approaches to monitoring and measuring disadvantage in higher education.

Establishing the criterion validity of the Graduate Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT)

Context  This paper examines the criterion validity of the Graduate Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT), which has been used since 1996 in Australia and more recently in the UK and Ireland. The study provides evidence on the extent to which GAMSAT, in combination with grade point average (GPA) and interview scores, adds value to determining an individual’s capability for medical study. The study responds to increasing demand for information on the validity of selection processes. Criterion validity is important because it helps to empirically situate selection tests within their broader contexts by, for instance, providing an assurance to educators and the public that test results are valid and add value to selection decisions.

Excellent Measures Precede Measures of Excellence.

This paper identifies quantifiable indicators that might enhance the national evaluation of learning and teaching in Australian higher education. It begins by setting out a framework suitable for guiding the identification and selection of indicators. After a brief critical review of current indicator possibilities, it defines a number of possible indicators that might be developed. The paper works from the premise that as greater significance is placed on the outcomes of measurement, we need to place greater significance on measurement itself. It is imperative that appropriate and contemporary measures are used, and that evaluations are developed in ways that ensure that the basic availability of data does not dictate the approach.

Academic Job Satisfaction from an International Comparative Perspective: Factors Associated with Satisfaction Across 12 Countries

In many ways, the academic profession is one of the “key professions” in the knowledge society. Academics hold central positions in the knowledge society through their traditional roles as producers of knowledge and educators of knowledge workers. Universities are also emerging as a key source of innovation and economic and social development, taking on responsibilities previously in the realm of business and government (Etzkowitz et al. 2007). However, the positive and opportunistic outlook of university-driven innovation is contingent upon individual academics successfully adapting to these new roles and balancing competing demands. Across a wide range of studies, job satisfaction has been shown to correlate significantly with job performance, with the strongest correlation found in jobs requiring complexity and autonomy (Judge et al. 2001). Change has always been a key feature of the university and the academic profession, but academics have rarely played a positive role in initiating or supporting institutional reform. Almost without exception, academics defend traditions and the status quo, regardless of whether such traditions serve the long-term interest of the university (Altbach 1980). The university’s durability can be partly credited to the conservatism of the professoriate. Conservatism protects the university from ill-advised change or change for the sake of change. On the other hand, conservatism can also obstruct desirable change. Undoubtedly, the rise of the knowledge society envisages changes to traditional academic roles, and a motivated academic workforce, satisfied with their reconstructed academic jobs, is most likely to produce the greatest benefit to research, innovation and society. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that stakeholders seeking to influence the university’s role in the knowledge society understand what motivates academics in their everyday work. This, of course, is equally true for those in charge of our universities, be they vice chancellors, deans, heads of school or research directors.