This document summarizes a study on international student engagement with assessment in higher education institutions. It conducted interviews with students at two universities to understand how their backgrounds and the institutional contexts shaped their approaches. The study found that each institution had distinct assessment practices and cultures that most influenced how students engaged with assessment, more so than their own identities or past experiences. It argues a framework analyzing institutional profiles can help understand differences in student engagement between universities.

1. Developing a Conceptual Model for
Understanding Int St Engagement : The
Importance of Institutional Profiles
Dr Aneta Hayes
Dr Eloise Tan
School of Social Science and Public Policy
Education

2. The Study
• Narrative inquiry – works towards understanding of
international students ways of adjusting to
assessment in HE
• Focus – ‘turning points’ – critical moments in student
stories which illustrate how they position themselves
in relation to the researched topic (Duff and Bell, 2000)
• Preliminary stage – 10 students at 2 HE institutions,
STEM
• Main stage – 10 more interviews at each research
site
• Research question: How do the backgrounds of
students mediate their engagement with the
assessment process in STEM subjects?

3. Theoretical Framework
• Ecclestone (2009) identity, agency and structure -
allowed us to move from our initial focus on student
identity, which tends to be in the forefront of
engagement research using socio-cultural
frameworks (Crafter and Maunder 2012),
• Incorporated a discussion of student agency and
institutional structures that emerged during data
analysis.
• Essential in understanding how the participants
reflected narratives of purposeful change in
adjusting to assessment practices, and
• The prominent role that the institutional practices
played at each research site.

4. For example …
• Narratives also indicated that connecting national
background or previous school experiences to
engagement with assessment was inadequate.
• Despite highlighting the differences between
studying in their own countries and what they were
doing now, many narratives showed that students
were proactive about the expectations of
assessment shaped in the previous academic
backgrounds
• They knew, without necessarily trying to understand
why, that certain things ‘just had to be done’.

5. For example …
P4B: I’m used to the style [now]. So maybe if this plagiarism
rule was there in India from my first standard, I don’t know,
when we started doing projects in the seventh grade. So
then I don’t think it would be a challenging thing, I would
have been used to that system, I’ve learned it from
scratch. Here, it’s something different. I was doing
something, now it’s changed to something different.
(…) See, what I mean to say is, see, even here for example,
they say ‘We don’t allow plagiarism’, but at the end of the
day you are still going online, you are still browsing through
books. So at the end of the day, I think it’s still plagiarism.
(…)The only thing is you’re referring to their name, fine I’ve
taken it from so and so place, but if you see it on a wider
screen, it is still plagiarism, so I don’t see the difference.

6. For example …
• The narratives of many students indicated that
learners hold images of assessment and marking
prior to coming to university
• At the same time - developed a new understanding
of the marking framework at university and was
able to appreciate the greater amount of effort
that was required at third level.
• In conflict with parental expectations - which initially
created additional pressures but the student
demonstrated how s/he disconnected from the
‘set’ way of thinking – strategically making it easier

7. For example …
P2B: My mum doesn’t really get the college grading
system, so she still goes from like where she basically wants
100 and then when I’m like, ‘I got 67’, she’s like, ‘That’s
terrible’, and I’m like, ‘No, that’s a 2:1, that’s nearly a first,
it’s good enough in college’, and then she’s still like
‘No’(…) I think it’s like ingrained in their head a certain
number means that much, because even when you say,
kind of ratio it down to them, 70 is 90, and they’re still like,
‘Well 30 percent is a lot for that 10 percent’.
(…) I just tell - I like to keep them at minimum level of
knowledge, because if I tell them more they’ll expect and I
don’t like them asking me to do stuff. Because I know what
I am, I’ve got myself figured out so I don’t need someone,
like annoying me.

8. For example …
• Institutional practices seemed to have the greatest
significance because the narratives showed that
there was a reason why students engaged with
assessment in the way they did and that this reason
was related to specific codes of HE institutions
• Students recognised that following these codes led
to achieving a viable way of being
• The students learned to recognize what was
important in assessment with their lecturers. So,
different assessment expectations were an
important code that triggered the construction of
new strategies embedded in concerns of wanting
to do well.

9. For example …
P2B: Because when I put the same amount of work in,
I get a bit in this, like 65 in this, but then 75 in this. So I’m
just like it must be individual differences. People like
this and they’ll not like that. So then I’m trying to find
what individual lecturers like so that I can appease
them so that I can get 75 in everything (…) So then in
those, I seem to [do] better in because I’m just like
‘She’d love this’ , but I’m mostly thinking about what
they’d like to hear as opposed to ‘is this the best
article I’ve written?’

10. Preliminary Conclusions …
• multiple influences exist in an individual’s world and that
each of these influences plays a different role in
students’ approach to and performance on assessment
• Nevertheless, central to each narrative were the current
institutional assessment practices which seem to be ‘left
out’ in the combination of identity, agency and structure
• The lenses of identity, agency and structure tend to refer
to factors from students’ past lives (undeniably play a
role) but do not take into account the present contexts
of action of students,
• We argue that these contexts provoke the dynamic
interplay between the influences from the past and
engagement with the present.

11. Preliminary Conclusions …
• Institutional assessment practices of a HE institution
are the main reason why students adjust to engage
with assessment in a specific way
• They are the ‘turning points’ – points of departure
from old identities
• Different at institutional levels – clear differences
emerged between the cohorts at the two
universities
• universities need to be able to develop models that
shift our attention to the role of HE institutions
• Universities need a heuristic through which they can
obtain an analytical fix of the engagement of their
students (Jary and Parker 1998)

12. Preliminary Conclusions …
• While exploring engagement through socio-cultural
frameworks can be useful, it does not seem to be
practical in the context of mass HE
• continually increasing diversity of students in our
universities - this may advantage only particular
groups of students
• HE operates based on ‘deeply ingrained rules,
cultures, values and professional protocols that
revolve around the struggle for academic capital’
(Naidoo and Jamieson, 2005, 270)
• To help deconstruct and analyse this struggle – we
need to have institutional profiles frameworks

13. Preliminary Conclusions …
• By analysing more data from the second stage of
our project, we are also beginning to note other
important aspects of ‘institutional profiles’ and these
include different disciplines, mission statements,
historical legacy, institutional ethos, socio – political
contexts and previous educational success of
students (Hayes, forthcoming).
• While, initially, we did not aim to conduct a
comparative study, we are now beginning to
understand that looking at institutions in
comparative terms regarding their various aspects
of institutional profiles can help us built a better
heuristic for understanding student engagement.
• Grants and partners, feedback