Results from a new study of coursework postgraduate students’ engagement in education suggest that, while coursework postgraduates in Australasia tend to have higher levels of engagement than undergraduate students, Australian and New Zealand higher education providers could do more to improve student and staff interactions and provide enriching educational experiences.

More than 10 000 students from 15 higher education providers in Australia and New Zealand participated in the first full administration of the Postgraduate Survey of Student Engagement (POSSE) in 2010. ACER released a research briefing paper on the results in late April.

ACER Senior Research Fellow Dr Daniel Edwards said POSSE is the first major effort to collect meaningful data from postgraduate coursework students in Australia and New Zealand.

“The coursework postgraduate population is very important to higher education, but often these are the forgotten qualifications that come in between undergraduate and research higher degrees,” Edwards said.

POSSE is closely linked to the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE), the largest survey of current university students undertaken in Australia and New Zealand. The surveys provide internationally comparable data relating to student engagement and learning outcomes.

POSSE 2010 reveals that coursework postgraduate students have higher levels of engagement than undergraduate students, particularly in the areas of Academic Challenge, Work Integrated Learning and Higher Order Thinking. More specifically, coursework postgraduate students indicate greater involvement in synthesising ideas, blending academic learning with workplace experience and in making judgements about the value of information.

International students in coursework postgraduate studies have higher levels of engagement than domestic students on all engagement scales except Work Integrated Learning. Outcomes were more evenly split, with International students recording higher General Development, Career Readiness and General Learning Outcomes, while domestic students have higher levels of Overall Satisfaction, Average Overall Grade and Higher Order Thinking.

Engagement levels among postgraduate coursework students vary in relation to the field of education studied. Information technology students tend to have lower levels of engagement than those from other fields, particularly in Work Integrated Learning, Higher Order Thinking and Overall Satisfaction. Health students in coursework postgraduate degrees report very high scores on the Work Integrated Learning scale but much lower scale scores than the other fields for Active Learning.

In each field of study, less than 5 per cent of students said they ‘very often’ interact with teaching staff on other activities. This is a worrying finding given that research has shown the contact students have with staff are among the strongest influences on positive learning outcomes. Only in the science fields does students and staff working together outside of class appear to be evident, possibly as a results of experiments conducted in these fields that require extra time. Science students are also substantially more likely to express a desire to continue on to a research degree while management, engineering and creative arts students show the least interest in further study involving research.

Departure Intentions are particularly high for architecture and information technology students. Coupled with relatively low satisfaction for postgraduates in this field, these results suggest that further efforts to engage and encourage these students might improve their university experience and retain them through to graduation. Early-departure intentions are also higher for later-year coursework postgraduate students than for those in their first-year. While the average score for this group is still relatively low, the finding here suggests that additional attention to supporting these students through the final stages of their degrees may be worthwhile.

POSSE is a collaboration between ACER and participating universities. The full briefing, Monitoring risk and return: Critical insights into graduate coursework engagement and outcomes, is available from http://ausse.acer.edu.au

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