Student engagement and value co-creation: a model of university and student impacts on the quality of educational outcomes

Student engagement is a phrase that is now common in the vocabulary of academics and higher education managers but there is little clarity about what it actually means and how this can be encouraged and harnessed. The theories around student engagement have emerged from the educational discipline and have been quite isolationist. This study integrates these theories with those of value co-creation to give a different and additional perspective that has a valuable contribution to theory and practice. The study uses the UK Engagement Survey from the Higher Education Academy as a basis for developing a model of student engagement. Undergraduate students at a university were surveyed using the amended UKES instrument and a sample size of 891 was obtained. The survey instrument included qualitative open comments that were analysed alongside the quantitative data. SPSS was used to generate descriptive and comparative statistics and exploratory factor analysis, which was further, developed using AMOS into confirmatory factor analysis to specify a model of student engagement. The additional items used from the value co-creation literature significantly enhanced the final model outcomes. The study has made important contributions to the areas of method, in its use of the amended survey incorporating qualitative aspects, of theory in the integration of theories from different academic disciplines and of practice, in the development of a useable model that had implications for use in universities.