Abstract:

A self-assessment tool that can help faculty identify:
(i) the level at which their present pedagogy is engaging students and;
(ii) which pedagogical modifications can enhance student engagement in their classes, can immensely support faculty efforts to strengthen learning outcomes for students across class formats and disciplines.

This paper will introduce an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based, empirically developed self-assessment tool that will help faculty improve their existing pedagogy to make it more engaging for students. The resulting pedagogy can help faculty get better attention from students which has proven to lead to better learning.

Although seminal works of researchers such as Alexander Astin (1984) led to significant interest in the idea of “student engagement” and the literature evolved over time, these works have been precipitated by falling enrollments, increasingly strained economic conditions and changing student perspective of higher education. Resulting student engagement measures are more tuned to gauge student’s involvement on campus, making only remote correlations of co-curricular engagement with their actual learning in class (e.g. the popular National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). While this has led to increased resources dedicated to campus engagement, the absence of an informed tool for academic engagement leaves faculty struggling to engage Gen Z in class and enhance their learning. The available measures are either focused on engagement in schools (e.g. Hughes, Luo, Kwok and Lyod 2008), or are not empirically developed and tested (Handelsman et al. 2005).

Through this presentation, I will share the empirically researched elements of student engagement, and introduce the empirically developed robust, artificially intelligent online tool to help participants revise their existing syllabi to make it more engaging for their students. This is a user-friendly self-assessment tool for instructors that assesses the level of academic engagement in their existing pedagogy and provides practical recommendations for improving the pedagogy for enhanced student learning.

The new online instrument is a user-friendly tool that the researchers are developing. The tool will be ready for presentation and use of faculty by the time of the conference. The tool is a great pedagogical improvement resource for higher education faculty teaching any discipline in any format.

Keywords:

Pedagogy, Student Engagement, active learning.