A multi-layered evaluation of university-wide education interventions to improve student engagement and retention

The strategic benefit of student retention is financial for institutions, economic for states and personal for individual students. Nonetheless, enacting and evaluating effective innovations to improve retention is challenging. This paper reports a multi-layered set of methods combining a quasi-experimental design, statistical methods with a dynamic learning analytic approach based upon baseline of data, multiple data sets and mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) to explore how student engagement, progression and retention were affected by learning interventions of different varieties deployed across a university. With a cross-university team including executive and faculty leadership, our strategy-guided intervention reached 65% of the university’s first-year students (with 2,990 students from 36 modules/units, and 24 disciplines, involved in the study). Our main findings show that the most benefit in retention was gained by the use of supplemental instruction, which coincided with increased satisfaction of students’ psychological needs as a proxy measure of engagement. Cost-benefit modelling indicated that our strategic interventions also led to substantial revenue gains. This paper provides a framework for higher educational institutions to evaluate similar programmes and demonstrates the efficacy of the programme that we assessed.