Engagement for Enhancement : Report of a UK Survey Pilot

This report presents the findings from a UK pilot of selected questions from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). 8,582 responses were gathered from nine institutions in Spring/Summer 2013. Also available to download are a full report of the cognitive testing by researchers from King’s College London, a set of institutional case studies demonstrating the value of student engagement data, and a file containing full results from the survey

How radical is student engagement? (And what is it for?)

This paper argues that the term ‘student engagement’ as used in UK higher education covers activities with two distinct sets of benefits: those that are pedagogical, and those that are political. Without an overarching account of the value of student engagement that can unify these two sets of benefits, the concept of student engagement in the UK is therefore fundamentally fractured. The paper proposes that critical pedagogy can provide that underpinning account, but at the expense of the current mainstream nature of student engagement. The paper therefore argues that those working in student engagement in UK higher education face a dilemma: either sacrifice the idea of student engagement as a popular solution to mainstream challenges, or give up the idea that student engagement has a unified set of benefits and coherent purpose

Evaluating an online induction course at the University of Strathclyde

‘We are Strathclyde’ is a new online course for incoming undergraduates at the University of Strathclyde. It is designed to build their confidence about beginning their studies by introducing them to a range of academic skills and key information. The course ran in the summer of 2016, and detailed data was collected from nearly 1000 participants in order to facilitate in-depth evaluation. Quantitative data about students’ engagement with the 50 different learning activities was collected as well as qualitative weekly reflections. Pre- and post-course questionnaires were administered to explore students’ perceptions of the course and their confidence and concerns about starting life at Strathclyde. This engagement and experience data has been linked to students’ demographic information in order to create a rich dataset that allows detailed analysis. After describing the context of the evaluation, and the quantitative and qualitative research methods used, the presentation will explore two research questions: 1. How successful was the course at engaging students in the learning activities? Were some topics and activity types more popular than others, and was engagement related to the students’ discipline or demographic characteristics? 2. Is there a relationship between students’ engagement in the course and their confidence and concerns about starting at Strathclyde? And is that relationship mediated by students’ characteristics

The ideology of student engagement research

In a series of recent papers, Nick Zepke has criticised those researching student engagement in higher education for uncritically supporting neoliberalism. The current highly politicised nature of higher education means that clarity about the political implications of engagement research is crucial. This conceptual paper argues that in focusing on literature on students' engagement in learning, Zepke overlooks another substantial body of engagement literature, on students' participation in decisions about learning and teaching. By exploring the political alignment of two of the key models used to conceptualise students' engagement in decision-making, the paper argues that a central element of the research into student engagement is in fact directly opposed to neoliberal approaches to higher education. Student engagement has been deployed both for and against neoliberalism. Zepke has argued that the research on engagement sides with neoliberalism; I show that the research that focuses on student engagement in decision-making supports the opposition

Relative representations for cognitive graphs

Although the latent spaces learned by distinct neural networks are not generally directly comparable, recent work in machine learning has shown that it is possible to use the similarities and differences among latent space vectors to derive "relative representations" with comparable representational power to their "absolute" counterparts, and which are nearly identical across models trained on similar data distributions. Apart from their intrinsic interest in revealing the underlying structure of learned latent spaces, relative representations are useful to compare representations across networks as a generic proxy for convergence, and for zero-shot model stitching. In this work we examine an extension of relative representations to discrete state-space models, using Clone-Structured Cognitive Graphs (CSCGs) for 2D spatial localization and navigation as a test case. Our work shows that the probability vectors computed during message passing can be used to define relative representations on CSCGs, enabling effective communication across agents trained using different random initializations and training sequences, and on only partially similar spaces. We introduce a technique for zero-shot model stitching that can be applied post hoc, without the need for using relative representations during training. This exploratory work is intended as a proof-of-concept for the application of relative representations to the study of cognitive maps in neuroscience and AI.Comment: 19 pages, 1 table, 6 figures. Accepted paper at the 4th International Workshop on Active Inference (Ghent, Belgium 2023

The UK Engagement Survey 2014 : The Second Pilot Year

This report presents the findings from the second pilot of the UK Engagement Survey. 25,500 responses were collected from 32 participating institutions, and the data revealed an interesting picture of how students in the UK engage with a range of important educational activities. Also available to download is a full report of the qualitative research into the validity and reliability of the questionnaire, using cognitive interviewing to explore students’ interpretations of the survey items. The Data Annex consists of full results broken down by student and institutional characteristics, and supplements the main survey report

VIP Approach at the University of Strathclyde : A Pilot Evaluation Report 2015-16

The potential for enhanced knowledge creation through collaborative group effort has been reasonably well established within educational discourse. This stands in direct contrast to former traditional models, where knowledge was treated as a transmitted commodity from ‘expert’ to ‘student’. Such transmission models have long been viewed as broadly ineffectual, especially as regards the teaching of primary Science, Technologies, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) subjects. The Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) approach may offer pedagogical advancement in terms of STEM teaching and learning in Higher Education (HE). Established within the University of Strathclyde some five years ago, an initial University-wide evaluation of the programme was piloted in Session 2015-16. Students’ perceptions of their participation in VIP generally very positively reported within the pilot evaluation. Key messages centred on students’ perceptions of the benefit of participation in the unique collaborative real-world study afforded by the VIP approach and their desire for the programme architecture to expand even further both laterally and vertically across the University

Search for Gamma-ray Emission from Dark Matter Annihilation in the Large Magellanic Cloud with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

At a distance of 50 kpc and with a dark matter mass of $\sim10^{10}$ M$_{\odot}$, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a natural target for indirect dark matter searches. We use five years of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) and updated models of the gamma-ray emission from standard astrophysical components to search for a dark matter annihilation signal from the LMC. We perform a rotation curve analysis to determine the dark matter distribution, setting a robust minimum on the amount of dark matter in the LMC, which we use to set conservative bounds on the annihilation cross section. The LMC emission is generally very well described by the standard astrophysical sources, with at most a $1-2\sigma$ excess identified near the kinematic center of the LMC once systematic uncertainties are taken into account. We place competitive bounds on the dark matter annihilation cross section as a function of dark matter particle mass and annihilation channel.Comment: 33 pages, 22 figures Version 2: minor corrections and clarifications after journal peer review proces