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Using UKES to Enhance Staff-Student Reflection and Engagement

Explore how the University of Winchester uses the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) as a tool for critical reflection and evaluation, fostering student self-reflection on academic engagement, progress, and development. This workshop-based approach encourages students to reflect on their learning experiences and the development of their knowledge, skills, values, and attributes.

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Using UKES to Enhance Staff-Student Reflection and Engagement

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  1. Using UKES to Enhance Staff-Student Reflection and Engagement Juliet Winter and Cassie Shaw

  2. Who we are and our institutional context Juliet Winter, Senior Researcher in Learning and Teaching Development Cassie Shaw, Learning and Teaching Enhancement Officer University of Winchester  • Small-medium university in Hampshire consisting of a broad range of courses arranged into five faculties: • Business and Law • Arts • Humanities and Social Sciences • Education, Health and Social Care • Health and Wellbeing 

  3. UKES at the University of Winchester • The University of Winchester has participated in the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) since 2015/16.​ • All UG students are invited to participate. • A generally low survey response rate, although this has grown over time to exceed the sector-wide average: from 10% in 2015/16 to 16.7% in 2017/18.​ • Survey findings feed into institutional and programme-level reporting on L&T.  • Valued by staff. • Identified the potential for the UKES to be used as an enhancement tool.

  4. Developing our approach - critical contexts • The increasingly metric-driven HE sector in the UK and the enshrining of 'satisfaction' as a meaningful measure of what students are doing. • Kandiko-Howson and Buckley (2017) describe that in developing the UKES, dissatisfaction with the NSS was a core motivation. • The key purpose of the UKES was for it to be used as a tool for enhancement and not comparison between institutions (Kandiko-Howson and Buckley, 2017). • At Winchester, we wanted to fulfil these aims and use the survey for critical reflection and evaluation with regards to academic and personal development.  • We saw potential in the survey as a tool that could create an environment for students to explore the learning gain they had experienced upon entry into higher education, as advocated by Neves and Stoakes (2017). 

  5. Developing our approach - our aims • To use UKES as a tool that would create the space for students to reflect on their learning and learning gain - not just what they learn, but how and why they engage in the ways they do.​ • To position UKES as an opportunity to explore with students their learning experiences and the development of their knowledge, skills, values and attributes.​ • To increase the pedagogic literacy of our staff and students.​ • To continue to increase our survey response rate.​ • To enhance the quality of student responses (for example, more in-depth qualitative comments).​ • We wanted staff to explore UKES not as a performance management tool or a metric/ data-driven stick, but as a platform for framing discussion around development.

  6. What we developed - workshop outline • Workshops were offered to programme teams, to take place in class time at any point during semester 2. • The workshops took the form of a three-tiered approach:

  7. Tier 3 - workshop outline • This workshop sought to position the themes of UKES as a critically evaluative tool for student self-reflection on their academic engagement, progress and development. It consisted of: • Activity 1: ‘Critical Thinking’ and ‘Reflecting and Connecting’​ • Activity 2: ‘Course Challenge’ and ‘Engagement with Research and Inquiry’​ • Activity 3: ‘Skills Development’ • We aimed to challenge students to consider the impact of their engagement and learning with regards to both university study and the 'real world' - academic and personal development.

  8. Workshop resources ​ • Activity One: Fake News​ • This activity was designed to engage students with the themes of questions one and seven in the UKES around Critical Thinking and Reflecting and Connecting. To get the students reflecting on the critical thinking skills they have developed over their time at university and making connections with their everyday experiences, we started with an activity, topically phrased, 'Fake News'. In this activity we showed the students three different sources discussing global warming through different communication channels. 

  9. Workshop resources • Activity Two: Scattegories​ • The second activity we asked the students to engage with was based on the board game 'Scattergories'. This used and adapted the game's rules and activities for educational development purposes. The game required a student to roll the dice to select a letter from the alphabet as inscribed on the 20-sided dice. Once the letter had been selected, the students had to think of a theory, theorist, concept, phrase or key term beginning with that letter that they had learnt or researched on their course. The points were awarded to the students who thought of an answer that nobody else had, which encouraged students to think of independent research they had conducted, to try to get the most unique answers and thus be awarded more points. This task was aimed at getting students to think about the UKES questions themed around CourseChallenge and Engagement with Research and Inquiry.

  10. Workshop resources • Activity Three: Washing Line of Skills​ • The final task we set students in the UKES workshop was a practical task to produce a 'washing line' of skills. We tied a string from one side of the lecture room to the other to create the washing line, and asked students to reflect on the top three skills they felt they had acquired at university,as well as how these have helped them in their lives outside of university. They then were asked to write their thoughts down on paper and come up and peg them on onto the washing line. This activity came last because we wanted the students to consciously, or unconsciously, reflect on their engagement with the previous activities and see how much they had learnt during their time on the course. 

  11. Engagement with the workshop pilot • Three programmes across two faculties participated in the pilot, runningthe workshops in class time.​ • Engagement varied with respect to the following: • Programme or module leaders chose to incorporate the survey in different ways and with different year groups. • Student participation in workshops varied significantly, both among individual students and whole cohorts.  • Response rates increased among the cohorts who took part in the workshops; however, the number of responses given to free text questions was particularly low across all three programmes in comparison to the wider institutional data.

  12. Key findings • The UKES workshops proved an effective model for engaging students with the survey - increasing response rates and facilitating valuable discussion in relation to the survey themes.​ • When aligned with existing reflective work or tasks, the workshops were especially effective. • The success of the workshops depended on the module tutor's approaches to, and engagement with, the workshops far more than we had anticipated.​ • The free text comments did not dramatically increase, as had been our aim, perhapsbecause the students required more space and/ or time to respond to them meaningfully. ​ • Unsurprisingly, time available for these types of enhancement activities (within timetabled sessions) was limited.

  13. Considerations for future development The team observed the following enhancements should be made:​​ • Increasing participation from tutors.​​ • Tailoring workshops to individual cohorts with regards to level of study, academic discipline and semester progress (relating to assignments, coverage of module content and similar).​​ • Reconsidering the structure of the workshops and giving studentstime at the end of the workshop to complete the survey, rather than asking them to complete it in intervals throughout the session.​​ • Continuing to consider the timing of workshops in relation to other institutional and national surveys.​ • Thinking further about how such an approach may be incorporated into teaching and learning on a larger scale and within the parameters we're all working with (namely time). We have continued to develop and adapt the approach in 2018/19 with these considerations in mind.

  14. Thank you Any questions or comments?

  15. Works cited: Buckley, A. (2014). The UK Engagement Survey 2014: The Second Pilot Year. DiCaprio, L. (2017). 26 January 2017. Available at https://twitter.com/leodicaprio/status/824665772077318147?lang=en [Accessed: 25 July 2018] Kandiko Howson, C. and Buckley, A. (2017). ‘Development of the UK engagement survey.’ Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(7), 1132-1144. Kuh, G.D. (2009). ‘The national survey of student engagement: Conceptual and empirical foundations.’ New directions for institutional research, 2009(141), 5-20. Neves, J. & Stoakes, G, (2018) ‘UKES, learning gain and how students spent their time.’ Higher Education Pedagogies, 3(1), 219-221. Trump, D. (2017). 28 December 2017. Available at https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/946531657229701120?lang=en [Accessed: 25 July 2018].

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