Faculty still matter to student engagement

Abstract

This study is a follow up to Umbach and Wawrzynski's (2005) much cited work connecting faculty teaching practices to student engagement. It relies on data from the same two national surveys used in the previous study. However, both the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement and National Survey of Student Engagement were significantly updated in 2013. As a result, our findings, which come from an updated and expanded set of measures for both students and faculty members, (1) confirm the prior study's findings by showing that students report higher levels of engagement and learning at institutions where faculty members use effective educational practices more and (2) show previously untested relationships between faculty practices and student engagement.