Assessment of Engagement: Using Microlevel Student Engagement as a Form of Continuous Assessment

Student assessment is a challenging topic where methods are still being developed to embed active learning, deeper understanding, fairness and appropriateness to the learning process. As a candidate assessment factor, student engagement is a known contributor to student success, although the lack of student engagement and success, particularly in online environments are both challenging and ongoing issues. Student engagement is typically measured in retrospective data collection to understand how engagement has affected student learning. However in online learning environments we have access to data in a timely manner from resource access to assessment tasks, where they can be captured seamlessly and used in analytics to understand student behaviours and learning patterns. By combining a microlevel student engagement measurement we have implemented, with the goal of assessing engagement, we present initial results in this paper from a study we have carried out at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, which shows promise in student engagement measurement as a form of continuous assessment. By measuring microlevel engagement, we have observed we can collect a variety of missing subjective dataset to complement the system-level data, and it can also be an opportunity for students to reflect on their own engagement as well as have a method to record their microlevel state. In several courses teachers rewarded points based on engagement, leading to continued engagement of students and a stream of actionable information to understand where students have challenges of engagement in their learning and revision of course content.

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