Relationship quality in higher education and the interplay with student engagement and loyalty.

BACKGROUND: To date, studies that have investigated the bonds between students and their institution have emphasized the importance of student-staff relationships. Measuring the quality of those relationships (i.e., relationship quality) appears to help with investigating the relational ties students have with their higher education institutions. Growing interest has arisen in further investigating relationship quality in higher education, as it might predict students' involvement with the institution (e.g., student engagement and student loyalty). So far, most studies have used a cross-sectional design, so that causality could not be determined. AIMS: The aim of this longitudinal study was twofold. First, we investigated the temporal ordering of the relation between the relationship quality dimensions of trust (in benevolence and honesty) and affect (satisfaction, affective commitment, and affective conflict). Second, we examined the ordering of the paths between relationship quality, student engagement, and student loyalty. Our objectives were to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship quality construct in higher education and its later outcomes. SAMPLE: Participants (N = 1649) were students from three Dutch higher education institutions who were studying in a technology economics or social sciences program. METHODS: Longitudinal data from two time points were used to evaluate two types of cross-lagged panel models. In the first analysis, we could not assume measurement invariance for affective conflict over time. Therefore, we tested an alternative model without affective conflict, using the latent variables of trust and affect, the student engagement dimensions and student loyalty. In the second type of model, we investigated the manifest variables of relationship quality, student engagement, and student loyalty. The hypotheses were tested by evaluating simultaneous comparisons between estimates. RESULTS: Results indicated that the relation between relationship quality at Time 1 with student engagement and loyalty at Time 2 was stronger than the reverse ordering in the first model. In the second model, results indicated that cross-lagged relations between trust in benevolence and trust in honesty at Time 1 and affective commitment, affective conflict, and satisfaction at Time 2 were more likely than the reverse ordering. Furthermore, cross-lagged relations from relationship quality at Time 1 to student engagement and student loyalty at Time 2 also supported our hypothesis. CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to the existing higher education literature, indicating that students' trust in the quality of their relationship with faculty/staff is essential for developing students' affective commitment and satisfaction and for avoiding conflict over time. Second, relationship quality factors positively influence students' engagement in their studies and their loyalty towards the institution. A relational approach to establishing (long-lasting) bonds with students appears to be fruitful as an approach for educational psychologists and for practitioners' guidance and strategies. Recommendations are made for future research to further examine relationship quality in higher education in Europe and beyond.

Behind the times: a brief history of motivation discourse in problem-based learning.

That idea that problem-based learning (PBL) is more motivating that traditional education has been prevalent since the inception of PBL at McMaster University in the late 1960s. Evidencing this through empirical research, however, has proven to be a lot more problematic. This paper retraces how the discourse on motivation started from a laymen's conception in the early days of PBL, and slowly evolved into a field of scientific inquiry in the 1980s and 1990s. However, looking at the evolution of motivation theory over the same period, we show that motivation discourse in the burgeoning literature on motivation and PBL remained largely wedded to the laymen's approach, and failed to catch up with the new achievement-goal theory and self-determination theory approaches. This paper proceeds to analyse the explosion of studies on PBL and motivation after 2000, acknowledging efforts to move away from anecdotal accounts and provide theoretical grounding to the research. However, once again, we show that the majority of the research employed outdated motivational measures that do not fully grasp the complexity of contemporary motivation theory. The paper concludes on the observation that single-course and curriculum-wide research interventions have yielded no conclusive results on the effect of PBL on intrinsic motivation, and that future research should therefore seek to use up-to-date motivational constructs in more targeted interventions.

The Association between Motivation, Affect, and Self-regulated Learning When Solving Problems.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) skills are essential for learning during school years, particularly in complex problem-solving domains, such as biology and math. Although a lot of studies have focused on the cognitive resources that are needed for learning to solve problems in a self-regulated way, affective and motivational resources have received much less research attention. The current study investigated the relation between affect (i.e., Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale), motivation (i.e., autonomous and controlled motivation), mental effort, SRL skills, and problem-solving performance when learning to solve biology problems in a self-regulated online learning environment. In the learning phase, secondary education students studied video-modeling examples of how to solve hereditary problems, solved hereditary problems which they chose themselves from a set of problems with different complexity levels (i.e., five levels). In the posttest, students solved hereditary problems, self-assessed their performance, and chose a next problem from the set of problems but did not solve these problems. The results from this study showed that negative affect, inaccurate self-assessments during the posttest, and higher perceptions of mental effort during the posttest were negatively associated with problem-solving performance after learning in a self-regulated way.