Is Your Student Engagement Strategy High-Calorie?

Student engagement is often equated with a verb, such as attending class, completing an assignment, or logging into the discussion board. However, the term is also used for specific outcomes like academic success, career readiness, and a sense of belonging. You might wonder, what is the connection between food calories and student engagement? The answer is that they are not that different, and let me explain why.

Take, for example, celery, a low-calorie food, while avocados are a high-calorie food. How many grams of celery do we need daily for a 3000-calorie diet? You would need an impractically large amount, as celery has about 16 calories per 100 grams. To get 3000 calories, you'd need around 41 lbs of celery! On the other hand, with avocados, which have approximately 160 calories per 100 grams, you'd need roughly 4 lbs of avocados to reach 3000 calories.

The analogy is similar to student engagement, as certain activities can count as engagement, attending classes, logging into the online platform, or completing a required activity. Still, it doesn’t mean it is sufficient to meet the learning outcomes. For example, there are numerous studies on the limitations of learning solely through lecture attendance, such as "Why Students Don’t Learn What We Think We Teach: Using Research to Guide Instruction" by Richard E. Mayer.

When it comes to student engagement, the "type" of engagement usually matters far more than merely measuring the "act" of engagement. The "act" of engagement is not that different from “eyeballs on a website.” Yes, eyeballs are a vanity metric, but as an e-commerce company knows, the difference between eyeballs on the website and conversion to actual sales involves enormous effort.

Similarly, learning is a complex human process. Attending an in-person or online class ensures a certain amount of learning to brush you up and make you more knowledgeable. But we know that authentic learning is related to processing information, not merely “showing up” and absorbing it. Luckily, there has been much work on the principles behind active learning (and engagement) that can be applied in this context. I would recommend you check out one of my favorite books on this topic by Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn - “Active Learning Online”.

Active learning pedagogy provides a good reference on what’s helpful and what is not. However, we’ll need to consider engagement not only in the context of learning and memory (the brain), but also other socio and behavioral aspects of learning and human development, towards what we are calling Whole Human Capabilities.

Examples of high-calorie engagement toward building Whole Human Capabilities:

Critical thinking and problem-solving:

• Conversations: Student-driven conversations on relevant topics that augment their understanding of the subject.
• Peer learning & support: Students answering questions for one another.
• Knowledge integration: Sharing examples of how the specific things they are learning integrate with their broader understanding of their subject.

Emotional & cultural intelligence:

• Personal storytelling: Introducing themselves holistically to their peers and instructors to be seen as a human.
• Language use: Being empathetic and courteous about different points of view, whether taught by the instructor or during discussions with fellow students.
• Learner voice: Creating a safe environment where students can share their questions (without being judged) or their unique take.

Leadership:

• Agency: The ability to share a new topic or idea for discussions and considerations, with the instructor and students participating as co-constructors of knowledge.
• Mastery: Safely expanding their knowledge and applying their understanding of a topic through repeated trial and error.
• Thought leadership: Elevating the collective knowledge (as a group) by introducing new relevant information and ideas.

Growth mindset & curiosity:

• Inquiry: Developing a natural curiosity about the subject and its area of interest through a deeper exploration of a topic.
• Mental plasticity: Being able to challenge their ideas and information in the context of new information.
• Inclusivity: Understanding and appreciating different points of view that are context-dependent.

Empathy & conflict resolution:

• Context understanding: Speaking with context to deeply understand a topic and its impact on others.
• Communication: Communicating clearly to establish a point of view and asking questions to understand others.
• Relationship building: Building lasting relationships with others on the same journey, whether a classmate, a dorm mate, or a fellow passenger in the same profession or industry.

We also need to be careful of applying practices that seem to work in one context automatically to student engagement best practices. Plenty of practices in education are remnants of the industrial era, where everyone was measured down to the test, and students were assessed on concrete goals. Just because something is thought to be helpful doesn’t mean it is or can show evidence. A good example is rote memorization, which many believe to be effective but fails to foster deep understanding and critical thinking.

This is an area where we, personally and collectively as the Yellowdig team, have spent countless hours to understand the underlying principles that drive good engagement. What we have tried to do is to build an online learning platform where some of these high-calorie engagement strategies can be easily implemented and scaled from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of learners in an institution - seamlessly and consistently. The best part of my job is working with passionate educators and institutional leadership to constantly upgrade and measure student outcomes to provide them with the best learning experience.

We often talk about human connections as a critical factor in student engagement because learning is not the transfer of knowledge but the transformation of the learner.

There are undoubtedly other dimensions we can think of, but this is a starting list for you to take a look at. What else would you add to the list?