Student engagement leads to better outcomes when students can speak up
Updated Jun 23, 2026
student voiceUniversities often know whether students attended, logged in, or completed a survey. They know much less about whether those same students felt able to influence what happened next. That is why Uriel Eduardo Torres Castro and Clelia Pineda-Baéz's open-access Higher Education paper, "Student agency in Colombian higher education: a dual-pathway model of mediation and moderation between student engagement and academic achievement", matters. For UK teams using student voice in higher education to interpret engagement and survey data, the paper makes a practical point: participation is more likely to translate into achievement when students can express preferences, ask questions, and shape the learning environment.
Context and research question
Student engagement is now one of the sector's favourite ideas, but it is often measured in ways that flatten the experience into participation alone. Universities can see whether students collaborate, interact with staff, or report a positive environment, yet still miss whether students feel able to influence teaching in real time. For UK higher education teams, that gap matters because a cohort can look engaged on paper while still feeling cautious, quiet, or dependent on staff to do all the relational work.
Torres Castro and Pineda-Baéz set out to test that missing piece. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional design, they analysed survey data from 1,713 final-year students across six accredited private universities in Colombia. The study drew on the National Survey of Student Engagement, or NSSE, plus the five-item Agentic Engagement Scale, and examined whether student agency acted as both a mediator and a moderator in the relationship between engagement and cumulative GPA. The analytical approach combined hierarchical regression with structural equation modelling, which makes the paper useful for teams that want more than a conceptual argument about voice.
Key findings
The most important result is that expressive voice was the only agentic behaviour that consistently carried the signal. When the authors modelled the five agency items together, the item about expressing preferences and opinions in class, labelled AES2, was the only one uniquely associated with GPA. In other words, not every form of initiative mattered equally. The meaningful difference was whether students felt able to say what they thought and influence the instructional exchange.
Collaborative learning and staff interaction still did the heavy lifting. Both Collaborative Learning and Student-Faculty Interaction remained positively associated with GPA when modelled with the other NSSE indicators. That matters because the paper does not argue that student agency replaces good teaching or strong peer learning. It argues that agency helps explain how those engagement opportunities become educationally useful.
Expressive voice partly transmitted the benefit of engagement into achievement, but only modestly. The indirect effects through AES2 were statistically significant for both Collaborative Learning and Student-Faculty Interaction, and around 6% of the total effect of Collaborative Learning on GPA was channelled through expressive voice. That is not a dramatic effect size, but it is a credible mechanism. It suggests that engagement becomes more productive when students are not simply present within a learning environment, but able to act within it.
Staff interaction mattered most for students with lower expressive voice. The moderation analysis showed a compensatory pattern: Student-Faculty Interaction had a stronger association with GPA among students who reported lower levels of expressive voice, while the relationship was weaker, though still positive, for students who already felt more able to speak up. For Student Experience teams, that is a useful warning against assuming every student benefits from support in the same way. Some cohorts need stronger structured interaction precisely because they are less likely to initiate it themselves.
The paper captures the overall message neatly:
"student agency is neither a universal amplifier nor a negligible factor"
That line matters because it prevents two common mistakes at once. Universities should not treat student voice as a soft extra, but they should not pretend one survey item or one initiative will solve engagement either.
Practical implications
The first implication for UK universities is to separate participation from influence when they gather feedback. If a module evaluation or pulse survey asks only whether students were engaged, teams can miss whether students actually felt able to contribute, question, or shape the learning process. This paper suggests that institutions should ask more precise questions about whether students can express preferences, raise concerns, and test ideas in teaching settings, especially where student and staff definitions of engagement already diverge. That produces a more usable diagnosis of what weak engagement actually means.
Second, universities should pair scale data with open-text evidence and triangulate it properly. A lower score on collaboration or staff interaction does not tell you whether the underlying problem is class size, confidence, feedback design, timetable pressure, or the tone of staff-student relationships. This is where benchmarking and triangulating student survey evidence becomes important, and where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally. Systematic analysis of comments helps teams see whether low agency is showing up as silence, uncertainty, reluctance to ask for help, or frustration with how participation is handled. The benefit is sharper action, not just better reporting.
Third, institutions should treat staff interaction as a strategic support lever for quieter students. The compensatory effect in this study suggests that structured contact with staff can matter most where expressive voice is weaker. That points towards low-stakes seminar participation routes, clearer office-hour expectations, guided questioning, targeted personal tutoring, and early support for students who are less likely to initiate dialogue. The benefit is that support reaches students before disengagement becomes a performance problem.
Finally, universities should be cautious about overclaiming from one metric or one context. This study is cross-sectional, based in Colombian private universities, and relies on self-reported GPA, so it should guide interpretation rather than act as a benchmark. The practical lesson is to test similar questions locally, document how measures are adapted, and use a defensible workflow for comment analysis and reporting. Our NSS open-text analysis methodology is useful here because it sets out how to combine survey scores and free-text comments in a way that stays reproducible and decision-grade. That gives UK teams a stronger evidence base.
FAQ
Q: How should a university apply this paper when designing engagement or module evaluation surveys?
A: Add one or two questions that test whether students feel able to influence the learning environment, not just participate within it. Then add an open-text prompt asking what makes it easier or harder to speak up in class, ask for help, or shape discussion. This helps teams distinguish low motivation from low confidence, weak teaching design, or limited routes for contribution.
Q: What should teams keep in mind before generalising from this study?
A: The study is strong on mechanism, but it is not a causal proof or a UK benchmark. It uses cross-sectional self-report data from six accredited private universities in Colombia, with GPA reported by students rather than taken from records. That means the findings are best used to sharpen local survey design and interpretation, not to assume the same effect size or pattern will appear unchanged in every institutional context.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It pushes student voice closer to the teaching interface. Voice is not only something collected afterwards through committees, end-of-module surveys, or annual reviews. It is also the day-to-day capacity to ask, challenge, clarify, and influence while learning is still happening. Universities that analyse comments and survey data through that lens are more likely to spot where engagement looks present, but agency is still missing.
References
[Paper Source]: Uriel Eduardo Torres Castro and Clelia Pineda-Baéz "Student agency in Colombian higher education: a dual-pathway model of mediation and moderation between student engagement and academic achievement" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01669-3
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