Student engagement suffers when students and lecturers define it differently
Updated Jun 05, 2026
Universities talk constantly about student engagement, but students and lecturers are not always talking about the same thing. At Student Voice AI, we see this problem whenever institutions rely on one set of indicators and assume the meaning is shared. Gerrit Crafford and Liezel Frick's Studies in Higher Education paper, "Reframing student engagement: a systems approach to bridging learner–lecturer dualities", matters for universities using student voice in higher education to understand why participation rises, stalls, or fragments. The paper argues that engagement becomes easier to improve when institutions compare student and lecturer accounts directly instead of assuming both groups define engagement in the same way.
Context and research question
Student engagement is often treated as if it were a stable, obvious category. Universities measure attendance, participation, VLE activity, and survey responses, then bundle them together as a signal of whether students are engaged. That approach can be useful, but it also creates a practical risk for UK higher education teams. If students and lecturers notice different signs of engagement, then an institution can collect plenty of data while still misunderstanding the problem it needs to solve.
Crafford and Frick set out to examine that gap. The study used a qualitative, interpretivist design and Interactive Qualitative Analysis to compare how students and lecturers in a professionally oriented Quantity Surveying honours programme understood the conditions that support or constrain engagement. The authors then mapped those conditions into two Systems Influence Diagrams, one based on student accounts and one based on lecturer accounts. Although the study is grounded in one South African institutional setting, the question is highly transferable for UK universities: what happens when student engagement strategies are built on only one side of the relationship?
Key findings
The paper's core finding is that student and lecturer engagement systems are organised differently. Students and lecturers did not just emphasise different examples. They structured the problem differently. Students focused on social learning, peer interaction, relevance, and the day-to-day feel of the learning environment. Lecturers focused more on departmental conditions, workload constraints, institutional capacity, and the broader structures that make engaged teaching easier or harder to sustain. For UK teams, that matters because engagement can be misdiagnosed if only one of those perspectives shapes the analysis.
"students and lecturers do not always define engagement in the same way"
Students treated engagement as something they could feel in relationships and participation. Peer interaction, group dynamics, belonging, and the practical relevance of study mattered strongly in the student account. That is an important reminder for institutions that measure engagement mainly through compliance signals such as attendance or platform activity. A student may meet formal expectations while still feeling disconnected from the course community, a pattern that fits related evidence showing student belonging declines over the first year, and first-generation gaps open later.
Lecturers located engagement further upstream in institutional conditions. Their accounts placed more weight on departmental climate, curriculum autonomy, workload equity, and the professional conditions needed to support relational teaching. In other words, weak engagement was not framed simply as a student motivation problem. It was also shaped by whether staff had the time, support, and room to design learning environments that make participation easier. That is a useful challenge to institutions that ask staff to improve engagement without examining the conditions under which they are working.
The most useful insight is not that one side is right and the other is wrong, but that both describe different parts of the same system. The two models still shared important elements, including teaching methods, group dynamics, personal attributes, and departmental influence. That overlap gives institutions a practical route forward. Rather than choosing between student perception and staff explanation, universities can use both to distinguish immediate teaching issues from wider structural constraints.
The paper also pushes back against passive or overly narrow engagement metrics. If students describe engagement through relevance, dialogue, and social learning, then institutions need evidence that captures those qualities. If lecturers describe engagement through workload, autonomy, and departmental culture, then enhancement plans need to address those realities as well. That makes engagement less of a headline label and more of a design problem that can be analysed properly.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to define engagement in operational terms with both students and staff. Do not assume a dashboard, a survey item, and a teaching strategy are all referring to the same thing. Use short closed questions, but add open-text prompts that ask students what helps or hinders their engagement and ask staff what enables or blocks engaged learning in practice. That works best when institutions build a joined-up student feedback system rather than collecting disconnected signals. The benefit is a clearer diagnosis of where engagement is breaking down.
Second, institutions should analyse engagement evidence at more than one level. Separate themes about teaching methods, peer interaction, course relevance, group climate, workload pressure, and departmental culture. This is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps universities compare recurring themes in free-text comments across modules, schools, and cohorts instead of treating engagement as one vague sentiment. The benefit is sharper prioritisation and fewer generic engagement plans that try to fix everything at once.
Third, universities should use engagement evidence to structure dialogue, not only reporting. If students describe weak peer interaction while staff describe limited room for relational teaching, that tension should become the starting point for a practical discussion at module, programme, or faculty level. Institutions then need to close the loop on student voice by showing what changed, what could not yet change, and who owns the next step. The benefit is that engagement becomes a shared improvement problem rather than a blame exercise.
The wider lesson is straightforward. Student engagement is not a single behaviour or score. It is a system shaped by relationships, teaching design, institutional conditions, and how different groups interpret what meaningful participation looks like. Universities that listen to both students and staff are better placed to act on the evidence they already collect.
FAQ
Q: How should a university measure engagement after reading this paper?
A: Start with a mix of indicators rather than a single proxy. Attendance and platform use still matter, but they should sit alongside open-text questions about peer interaction, relevance, teaching approach, and whether students feel able to participate meaningfully. It also helps to gather staff perspectives on what is enabling or constraining engagement, so the institution can see whether the two sides are describing the same issue.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is a qualitative study in one professionally oriented honours programme at one South African university, so it is not a sector benchmark and it does not estimate prevalence. Its value lies in explaining mechanisms and showing how student and lecturer accounts can be organised differently. UK teams should use it as an interpretive lens for local survey, focus group, and comment data rather than as a universal rule.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It suggests student voice work becomes more useful when engagement comments are not reduced to motivation or satisfaction alone. Students may describe engagement through belonging, collaboration, and relevance, while staff may describe it through workload, policy, and teaching conditions. When those perspectives are compared systematically, universities get a fuller picture of what needs to change and why.
References
[Paper Source]: Gerrit Crafford, Liezel Frick "Reframing student engagement: a systems approach to bridging learner–lecturer dualities" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2026.2660123
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