Disciplinary diversity in Chilean undergraduate student engagement

Abstract

There is growing interest in investigating the student experience in higher education, particularly given the considerable widening of access and, so, diversity. Chile’s Encuesta Nacional de Compromiso Estudiantil (ENCE) has been applied since 2017 by a group of universities of the Council of Rectors of the Chilean Universities (CRUCh), eliciting a battery of evidence covering the student experience. This study documents current efforts to organize information about the student experience into student engagement profiles, reported here with reference to selected undergraduate disciplines. The results of ENCE 2019 are analyzed, as applied to 9869 undergraduates in their first year and in their fourth year since commencing, in nine universities. Cluster analysis of the entire sample of students in all fields, and subsets of those respondents in the fields of Civil Engineering, Law, Medicine and Teaching, yield diverse patterns of student engagement. Further consideration follows of the current and potential use of student engagement data in Chile and other countries, and the differences across different study fields and professional traditions.