Enhancing Student Engagement through Student-Generated Activities: Case Study

Abstract

This paper overviews benefits of using student-generated activities, or exercises, as formative assessment within a course in order to enhance student engagement at three levels: behavioural, cognitive, and emotional. When going through the process of creating practice exercises, students tend to engage better with the content, make more autonomous choices, improve metacognitive skills, develop higher-order thinking, personalise their learning and adjust the level of challenge, generally becoming more active participants of learning. The results of student surveys and classroom observations conducted within our case study ($\mathrm{n}=36$) in the English for International Professional Communication course support these reports. Economics and Finance students demonstrated positive attitudes to generating English language practice activities and found these activities helpful for both those who created them and those who did them in class. The students perceived the key advantages as deeper language and text understanding, better retention of content, improved creative and analytical thinking, as well as higher perceived self-sufficiency. Despite potential challenges associated with student-generated activities, some pedagogical adaptations and scaffolding can mitigate the adverse effects and ensure that the task of creating activities is meaningful and engaging. These findings and techniques will be of interest not only to language teachers, but also to instructors of various subjects.