student engagement essay

Student engagement essay

The overall experience changes drastically in post secondary institutions compared to high school mainly because of student engagement. Student engagement is what adds to the atmosphere of a post secondary setting and being involved within a post secondary institution can really help with making friends and doing well in school. Student engagement can vary drastically through the classes, the campus and based through my experience as well as residence engagement.

In post secondary institutions students go through a big transition, as the environment that they are put into is very different from what they are used to. Student engagement is “the other focuses on students' cognitive investment, active participation in and emotional commitment to their learning” (Zepke et al, 2009). Student’s class engagement can decrease as they are put into a new environment, with different teaching and learning methods. The change in this could cause disengagement, as students become not motivated to accomplish good grades. Students need to realize that hard work, time and effort is needed, and if unable to do that grades could result very poorly. Relationships with teachers/professors are not strong in post secondary. Students who transition from high school to post secondary school are not given the attention that they were given in high school by their teachers. Students are used to being “babied” in high school, as they are told several times that an assignment needs to be done or are allowed to hand in late assignments. “Students are more likely to engage if they are supported by teachers who establish inviting learning environments, demand high standards, challenge, and make themselves freely available to discuss academic progress” (Zepke et al, 2010). In post secondary school, students need to go out of their way to get the extra help they need, as class sizes are usually very large. Since class sizes are usually large, students may have a difficult time listening, as well because classes range between one to three hours in length.

Coming to a new environment puts students out of their comfort zone. Campus engagement is all about how students interact with the extra curricular activities and getting involved with the school on campus. Students are put into a new environment and not knowing people when coming to a new school can be intimidating, and it makes it harder to become involved in the school clubs, sports, activities and committees. Sports teams could be more competitive as students could possibly just decide not to try out because they may think they are not good enough, and teams and clubs would require many hours a week, which could be very time consuming. Campus life is very different than high school, as students are used to all their classes being in one building, appose to post secondary school where classes are in multiple buildings and require to walk to different buildings.

In conclusion, the overall experience changes drastically in post secondary institutions compared to high school because of student engagement. Students poor class engagement could be that they are not motivated to do the work, not pushed by teachers to get assignments and homework done, and class sizes are quite large as it would be hard to focus. What is not realized is that students do not think it is as hard, as they slack the first term, but once they get their marks back, it’s a big shock to them. Getting involved in the campus could be challenging for some students because they are out of their comfort zone and they do not know a lot of people. They are hesitant to get involved, as it is a huge change from high school going into post secondary school. Student engagement can be challenging with students when they do not know what to expect going into post secondary school, but will eventually learn from their mistakes and start creating better class and campus ethics.