Student Engagement and Its Relationship with the Coverage of Academics in the News Media: An Exploratory Study from a Business School

Download files
Access & Terms of Use
open access
Copyright: Parwada, Jerry
Altmetric
Abstract
Today’s university institutional framework encourages and/or demands academics’ engagement with the public media. Are teaching and media appearances complementary aspects of scholarship or incompatible demands on academic staff time and energy? This topic is a theoretical and empirical black box. Using a large-sample exploratory study, I examine whether there is a relationship between student engagement, as measured by responses to student evaluations at the end of a course, and media appearances (in newspapers and magazines and on the radio and television). The sample consists of more than 14,000 responses to engagement-related questions from students formally surveyed in the Australian School of Business’ Course And Teaching Evaluation and Improvement (CATEI) process during 2008–2012. I matched the coded responses to each relevant CATEI question to a sample of all media appearances made by the Banking and Finance faculty during the study period. Cross-sectional regression methods are used to estimate the relationship between media appearances and student engagement, as well as the predictive power of an academic’s media presence relative to student engagement measures. Academic staff rank, course level, enrolment demographics, and other fixed effects are control variables. I find that media appearances by academics are negatively related to students’ ratings. The results are robust to alternative survey questions dealing with different types of engagement and call for further qualitative research to identify their likely drivers. The findings, though, are relatively modest in statistical terms due to the sample size–dictated aggregation of observations. However, the results point toward the importance of more nuanced and theoretically robust conceptions of the academics’ media profile-student engagement nexus. I offer suggestions for future research to extend this line of inquiry and resolve the inference problems identified.
Persistent link to this record
Link to Publisher Version
Link to Open Access Version
Additional Link
Author(s)
Parwada, Jerry
Supervisor(s)
Marshall, Stephen
Morsy Eckert, Leila
Creator(s)
Editor(s)
Translator(s)
Curator(s)
Designer(s)
Arranger(s)
Composer(s)
Recordist(s)
Conference Proceedings Editor(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Corporate/Industry Contributor(s)
Publication Year
2015
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Masters Thesis
Files
download public version.pdf 1.57 MB Adobe Portable Document Format
Related dataset(s)