How to measure a student’s engagement with learning

 Any comprehensive learning programs running face-to-face or digitally use practice tests to gauge their students’ level. These are in the form of examinations at the end of the study period that allow students to engage in further learning opportunities. They use these tests to understand the degree of completion of knowledge and the persistence of the student to excel. The learnings from such testing are in the form of both quantitative and qualitative data sometimes. And this data is used to devise further strategies for training instructors to encourage student engagement. But information is easy to manipulate. Unless the data has a wide range of responses, one cannot be sure if the content being tested has been as useful as planned initially.

What is student engagement?

Before measuring student engagements and defining various comprehensive learning programs, we need to define what it means. Student engagements fall under three broad categories, behavioral, emotional, and psychological. Some also describe emotional and psychological engagements as being similar. The behavioral kind of engagement can be tested correctly with practice tests as they provide data on continuous learning, the sustained concentration of the student, and their efforts over time. Most testing agencies usually ignore the emotional and psychological engagement that focuses on students’ interest and their challenge preferences.

Thus, most comprehensive learning programs gather data only related to one small part of the behavioral engagement related to academic engagement. They measure the time a student invests in finishing a task, their performance on the task, and their grades. This may sometimes be related to a student’s confidence in the learning methodology used, the test scores and their final grades, etc. However, there is more to teaching and learning than scores at an examination, although our teaching system is majorly skewed towards it. Any learning material that encompasses the learners’ emotional, behavioral, and cognitive reactions provides the perfect learning.

Many researchers have explained types of engagements over the years in a classroom. Some of them are interest in learning, sense of belonging to the class, enthusiasm for the topic, self-regulation, relationship with the others, attention in the class, communication with others, application of knowledge, cognitive task solving, and many more. Yet not all strategies are suitable for all teaching environments or for comprehensive learning programs and their practice tests all the time. There is no perfect method of teaching that is suitable for all. Education is an art that modifies itself as per the audience to a great extent.

How to engage a student?

Other than the items that one may use for comprehensive learning programs, one needs to realize that an engaged learner displays indications that can be tracked. A successful learner will invest time to prepare for the lesson, motivate others to learn, and learn while self-directing themselves in a digital world. They also interact with their teachers and peers, construct knowledge, apply this learning to the real world, select learning content that helps them further, and develop their personal learning strategies. Learning involves many skills and emotions, while practice tests focus on only a small part of this whole act of learning.

The role of the instructor or teacher

It has also been seen that student engagement can be enhanced in comprehensive learning programs by focusing on two factors to a large extent. This has been proved via research as for a student to be engaged in any content usually, the design of the content and the behavior of the instructor play major roles. Thus, a qualified and certified teacher who has taken up one or more professional development courses is a better bet to provide education. This shall ensure that the content and its design interact with the student. Practice tests in such a scenario not only gauge the rote capacity but provide learning about relevant and exciting real-world experiences.

And the behavior of the instructor helps motivate the student by providing them with meaningful feedback and offer encouragement in a timely manner. Such instructors in any of the comprehensive learning programs are found effective teachers whom students lend support through other behaviors that enhance learning. Thus, any traditional or digital programs should ensure that the students’ disengagement is minimized by providing opportunities to the instructor to participate through discussion posts, feedback, and more, other than normal classroom activities.

Conclusion

The improvements through technology to comprehensive learning programs have provided a plethora of engagement opportunities to both the student and the instructor. Other than the apparent enhancement of knowledge as provided by scores gained through various practice tests, the student and the teacher’s behavior has to be optimal. Although there are many real-life examples of exceptional teachers available who were untrained, they all provide an engaging environment for the student. The instructor’s perceptions about the student may also play a vital role in the effectiveness of any teaching programs.

An initiative in Adult Learning

Adult Learning is when an adult makes a conscious or unconscious competence choice to learn. This learning theory, though quite new, has its various parameters that mould it and give it the necessary essence. Stephen Lieb has broadly defined adult learners as:
1. Autonomous and self directed
2. Having life experiences
3. Are goal oriented
4. Are relevancy oriented
5. Are practical about the learning
6. Need respect

These characteristics are but generalized ones and need to be modified to suit the Indian audience. Keeping this in mind, adult learning has in the Indian context being termed as Social Learning by some educationists as is evident in the First Five Year Plan (1951-56) by the GOI (Government of India). The major thrust of the Social Education Program was to make illiterate citizens conscious of their rights and responsibilities for building a democratic nation, while incorporating the components of health, recreation, and economic life. This Five Year Plan was not able to make its mark on the education sector in India. In the Fourth and Fifth Five Year Plans, this focus shifted to skill development, but even that did nothing much to promote education for adults. The National Adult Education Program (NEAP) conceptualized in 1976, too was unable to make a dent in the adult literacy areas as was proposed during its inception. The launching of the National Literacy Mission (NLM) in 1988 and its focus on various activities like workshops in rural areas, campaigns, seminars, schemes for rural areas, focus on women empowerment, conservation of the environment, advertisements in radios and TV to gain attention and various other methods focused on developmental literacy, seemed to be the answer to India’s illiteracy problem. The Continuing education program of the NLM is envisaged to link literacy with actual life situations by imparting relevant technical and vocational skills.

In the present scenario, with the increasing popularity of the Internet and other technological breakthroughs, do rural adults still feel themselves at par with their brethren in the cities and metros?

My observation on this is with rapid technological, economic and social changes in society, initial education is now regarded as being inadequate in terms of preparing individuals with the skills and knowledge required for life in a knowledge society. As a result it is necessary to widen access to adult learning opportunities in order to address the changing needs of society. In the rural India context, these adult learners are not just farmers and merchants, they are also higher education students, which till now have been mostly ignored in all adult education programs.

The Times of India started off a unique initiative, Teach India, a few months back to motivate and involve professionals to act as teachers (people who can teach and not just people with a degree to teach) to reach these rural areas. The catch here was to ‘teach the underprivileged’, a term that can propel a person from a run-of-the-mill to being a socially-aware individual. However, this project too has after its initial success, met with a silent demise. I believe the targeted teacher community was not as much interested to teach as was initially thought. But, as the researchers say ‘adult learning is androgogical, i.e. if the learner fails, it’s not seen as a failure of the teacher/instructor’.

Keeping this in mind, we conceptualized the TUNE (Together Understanding the Needs of Education) program. In our case, though the target audience’s age group does not qualify them always to be legally adults, they have taken a decision to be either Management gurus or Engineering giants. This conscious decision to go for a particular stream of education makes them adults.

Various adult learning theories in a nut shell define adults and their learning to be such people who have the necessary access to learning resources but have less time. Our adult learners have less time as they are involved in their college studies, but mostly have no or very less access to learning resources otherwise available so easily on the Internet. This makes our clientele very different from a clichéd adult learner.

TUNE was different from the Teach India initiative in the following ways:
Class: We have targeted MBA and Engineering students studying outside the metros. This was done as the demand for good teachers was found here and so were the ‘underprivileged’ children who come to the class hoping to be taught.
Technology: India till now, thanks to its resource base (read population), has its teachers available. The problem arises as these teachers are mostly available only in the metros leaving a lacunae in educational institutes in the rural sector, where teachers are either lax to go or are just plain unavailable. Taking this factor in consideration we use the VSAT model as a platform for student-teacher interactions. The teachers sit in a metro city and the students can interact with them on real-time, just like they do in a real classroom, albeit with a time delay of 5-6 seconds. This helps highly educated and good teachers to come to this so called ‘Pit stop’ and start teaching.
Reach: We realized that even motivated professionals would have a limited time and considering the length and breath of India, it might not always be feasible for even a really motivated professional to take an off, even for such a lofty cause. So instead, they can sit in a studio close to their home and interact with the students in real time.
Methodology: The aim of the program was to make students interested in the class. As we were aiming at Personality Development/Soft Skills instead of academic excellence, it became even harder to convince students to take these classes. Nobody gives themselves less than an ‘A’ in personality. Our objective is to use simulated work situations, case studies, stories, videos and group activities to build knowledge. This is done based on Pareto’s principle of using 80% practical exercises and 20% lectures to make learning fun. We made the lectures interesting for the student so that they ‘want’ the class and not the other way round. This we achieved by a simple thought that not all students are equally motivated to start learning. So, to make them interested in the class we provide them with ‘Glues’. Glues are meant to glue a student to the class by using videos, stories, etc. that brings out their interest in the class. These items were interspersed with a mixture of ppts, videos showing real time examples of a famous personality, role plays showing a particular situation and how to handle it. Though the major part focuses on Learning by Doing or DIY (Do it yourself).

With 6 colleges in 2 universities, these are still early days for TUNE. We are still modifying and researching new theories, pedagogies and testing them out in our colleges. I will keep you posted about the results of our successes… or otherwise.

Tell me and I will forget, Show me and I will remember, Involve me and I will understand.