DOI: 10.7929/issda/fms3rq
title: StudentSurvey.ie (Irish Survey of Student Engagement), 2020

description: The central aim of StudentSurvey.ie (Irish Survey of Student Engagement, formerly known by the acronym “ISSE”) is to develop a valuable source of information about students’ experiences of higher education in Ireland. The results of the survey are intended primarily to add value at institutional level, and to inform national policy. A detailed online survey was offered to first year undergraduates, final year undergraduates and postgraduate students on taught programmes. Data are presented as responses to individual items and as calculated scores for nine indicators that relate to broad aspects of student engagement, such as Collaborative Learning and Higher Order Learning. StudentSurvey.ie has formative links with the US National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE). Thus, Irish data can be evaluated in the context of other jurisdictions in addition to the national or sector contexts. Note that a there was a substantial revision of questions deployed in 2016. This revision means that 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2016 data may be compared directly, but do not fully compare to data from previous years. The term ‘student engagement’ is used in educational contexts to refer to a range of related, but distinct, understandings of the interaction between students and the higher education institutions they attend. Most, if not all, interpretations of student engagement are based on the extent to which students actively avail of opportunities to involve themselves in ‘educationally beneficial’ activities and the extent to which institutions enable, facilitate and encourage such involvement. StudentSurvey.ie focuses on students’ engagement with their learning and their learning environments. It does not directly explore, for example, students’ involvement in quality assurance or in institutional decision-making. Measuring engagement can provide a means to develop a fuller understanding of the student experience above and beyond that ascertained through surveys of student satisfaction alone. A total of 44,707 students from twenty six institutions responded to the survey which was undertaken in February – March 2020. All but five participating institutions had completed fieldwork for StudentSurvey.ie 2020 before the restrictions due to public health guidance related to COVID-19 were put in place and the pivot to emergency online delivery of teaching began. When interpreting the results for 2020, it is important to bear in mind that all questions require students to reflect on the academic year to date in its entirety. The value of the results of StudentSurvey.ie is therefore twofold. Firstly, they provide insightful feedback from students about wide-ranging aspects of their experience, which institutions can use to understand and improve the student experience and to measure the impact of recent interventions. Secondly, and uniquely against the current backdrop, the results also provide us with a national and broad-based baseline of 44,707 students before their experience changed dramatically, with very little warning or time to plan for and adapt to the closure of campuses and emergency online environments. The StudentSurvey.ie National Report Editorial Group aims to establish this as a baseline, particularly in Chapter 4, and intends to return to the same questions in 2021 to evaluate the impact of the responses to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on the cohort whose experience of student life is anticipated to be changed most fundamentally – first year undergraduate students.