Abstract:

Among University lecturers there seems to have been a long held consensus that student performance is affected by their attendance and engagement. In this paper the author will be trying to substantiate this claim and will also look at a variety of student engagement factors such as employment during studies, distance from home to University, hours/week spent on individual study, etc. In order to be able to perform such analysis the author will utilize data collected for the past 3 years for a range of modules taught in the business programmes at the Sheffield Hallam University in the Faculty of Organisation and Management. While this research supports some of the more conventional points of view among the academia, some unexpected results have been observed, these will be detailed in the content of the paper.
In order to perform the analysis the author will be utilizing the available data and will look at correlation between relevant engagement factors and further on the correlation between student engagement and performance. Also, comparative methods will be utilized in order to identify trends in the available data. This way a quantitative as well as a qualitative analysis of the data will be possible.
Ultimately the results of this research can be utilized to better understand student behaviour in the higher education and also the factors that matter in terms of students achieving better performance. This will enable lecturers to focus their efforts in supporting and engaging students in key areas and improve the delivery of their curriculum accordingly. It is proposed here that there are areas where introducing changes is more valuable and will yield better results rather than trying to guess what actually students do in terms of their engagement and their performance. Given the range of data utilized and the broad range of modules studied it is the opinion of the author that the results of this study can be generalized and applied across many higher education programmes.

Keywords:

performance, engagement, analysis, students, education.