The ‘Using student engagement data to drive pedagogic innovation’ team at Newman University Birmingham builds on preliminary work seeking to devise an appropriate system for providing usable data on student engagement and progression. The focus for this collaboration centres on how such data is used to inform pedagogic interventions to support student success, rather than developing the data itself.
From across the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Performance (FASP) staff Kerry Myler, Helen Bardy and Adam Benkwitz and students Courtnie Reeve, Aaisha Akhtar, Tamara Smith, Penny Keeling and Rae-Anne Preece ran student-staff partnership projects at the discipline, programme and modular level. Analytics Systems Developer Sarah Abnett assisted with data preparation, integration and quality as well as third party liaison. Across the phases of the team’s work, Sarah Parkes from the Directorate of Learning, Teaching and Scholarship provided oversight of the team’s activities to ensure coherence as a whole, nurturing team members and advancing institution-wide discussion on using student engagement data.
Through Newman’s student-staff partnership framework, the team confirmed that it is the ‘human side of higher education that comes first’ (Thomas 2016) regarding academic success. This was achieved through the design, application and evaluation of data informed pro-active tutor and group-led peer mentoring systems in 2017/18 that were concurrently evaluated via focus groups and interviews.
Thematic analysis during evaluation found that mentoring across the variety of partnership projects reduced a feeling of isolation in new higher education students and promoted a sense of belonging. This correlated to an increase in assessment submission rates and a marked reduction in withdrawals and suspension. Collaborators believe the experience of working together has enabled closer and meaningful relationships between student-staff partners that resulted in reciprocal understanding of each other’s circumstances and responsibilities. This enabled the relationships to develop a trust that promoted a way of listening to student partners that broke down traditional power relationships.
Moreover, working across different disciplines and departments across the University enabled multi-disciplinary relationship-building, that in turn generated transdisciplinary knowledge across different staff and student groups. This prompted personal and professional development of student-partners, including improvements in their university assessments.