MAPPING THE INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF THE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT FIELD AT UNIVERSITIES

Around the world, universities are facing the challenge of engaging and motivating students, making them participate and ultimately involving them academically and emotionally in their own learning process and in recognition of the university itself. From the perspective of research, and in the debate on content and teaching praxis, increasing importance is being given to Student Engagement due to growing evidence of its critical role in students’ success and learning.

However, the way student engagement is managed at university level, especially in the Spanish system, still does not take a holistic perspective of the student’s experience. In order to fully develop the three dimensions of action to improve Student Engagement, a deeper research approach is therefore needed with a multidisciplinary perspective that takes into consideration the principal areas of improvement required to reinforce Student Engagement in the teaching and learning area.

In this paper, we aim to analyse the intellectual structure of the field of student engagement from a research point of view and to this end, we have made a bibliometric review. We have used SciMAT software to obtain a strategic diagram and the associated thematic evolution of the research.

The main contribution of this work is to provide a comprehensive and objective review of the topic, showing the state of the art of Student Engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), revealing the motor, peripheral, transversal and emerging themes. This study will make it possible to identify research gaps and provide pathways for future research on the topic, and consequently advance a system of continuous quality improvement for higher education.