Student engagement in the first year of study in undergraduate programmes in higher education.

Abstract

Student retention and throughput is a major concern across higher education within South African universities, with statistics suggesting that almost a third of students drop out of universities in their first year of study. Research in the field of student retention and throughput suggests that student engagement is regarded as the single best predictor of students’ retention, learning and personal development within higher education. Drawing from this research finding, this thesis focuses its attention to first year student engagement within a South African university. Using the University of Zululand as a case study, this thesis presents the results of a student engagement survey that was conducted across first year students enrolled in the Faculty of Education. The study followed a mixed method approach where both quantitative and qualitative methods of data generation were used. The South African Survey of Student Engagement (SASSE), adapted by the University of the Free State (UFS) for the South African contexts from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) developed in the United States of America (USA), was used to obtain information from 62% of first year students registered in the Faculty of Education in 2015. In addition, interviews were conducted with a sample of academic staff members who taught some of the first year modules in the same faculty. Interviews with students of varying academic achievements were also held to obtain explanations of why students were engaged in the ways they were. Further, documents analysis was done to find out the students’ academic performance. The final set of data was generated through focus group discussions. In investigating the nature of and levels of student engagement, I delimited the focus of the survey on the role played by the first year students, the academic staff and the institution in promoting student engagement. Specific focus was on exploring how students engage in academic work in their first year of study of their qualification. The purpose for the exploration and the investigation was to establish the nature of the relationship between student engagement and academic performance. Firstly, this study found that students tend to use their own creativity and initiatives to navigate around challenging academic and social activities, circumstances and practices. Secondly, the phenomenon of student-self-engagement emerged as a novel feature that seeks to extend the understanding on how students engaged academic activities. Thirdly, the study revealed that there is relationship between how students engage, the extent in which they engage and their levels of academic performance. Finally, the academic staff members’ attempts in engaging students are constrained by several factors, including large class sizes and lecture styles. In this thesis, I argue that student engagement is an individual student’s responsibility and that the nature and the level of student engagement within the first year of study have a direct relation to student academic performance. I further argue that students bring to university, aptitudes necessary for access and not necessarily sufficient for success and survival or to meet the academic demands in order to survive at university. Notably, the students’ cultural orientations showed cultural signals that proved to be limiting the nature, level and the manner in which students engage. This thesis contributes to the knowledge domain of student engagement, retention, throughput, and success as well as dropout rates in the higher education using a linear approach to student engagement.