How new postgraduates experience and connect or engage with human communication studies

What is it about?

New postgraduate students’ feedback on their learning offers insights into engagement. Student feedback to students and teachers can contribute to teacher feedback to students. When this happens, students can feel engaged or connected to their learning experiences. This study explored the extent to which students’ feedback on their new postgraduate experience stimulates engagement and promotes critical reflection on learning. Students’ feedback and reflections are geared towards developing and deriving maximum value from the experience. Students’ feedback and reflections on their new postgraduate experience demonstrate the potential for developing engaged study and research in further and higher education that benefits students and their teachers. Keywords: engagement, communication, postgraduate students, student experience, fee

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Why is it important?

Adopting a more inclusive notion of feedback on learning, this paper explores the role of personal efficacy beliefs and personal agency to extend the concept of academic engagement beyond its traditional domains of academic, behavioural and emotional engagement to include civic engagement with learning. Similarly, although the traditional notion of feedback frames it as an activity that is provided by teachers, it is also possible to conceive of students giving teachers feedback on their teaching and learning in further and higher education. A total of 12 postgraduate communication students were encouraged to reflect and give feedback on their re-entry into an academic learning community. In this qualitative design, students responded to a structured online request for email feedback on their experiences as new graduate students, their experience of studying two courses, their experience of shared teaching and learning activities with their instructor and the link between their research projects and civic engagement. Additional data on student assessments of teaching and their course work and examination performances corroborated written student feedback.

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