Beyond hard outcomes: ‘soft’ outcomes and engagement as student success

Abstract

This paper questions current policy discourses that equate student success with hard outcomes like retention, completion and employment. It offers another view, one that uses ‘soft’ outcomes and student engagement literature to widen our understanding of student success. In the paper, we first draw on literature to explore student engagement, usually understood as a means to achieve success, and ‘soft’ outcomes as acceptable student outcomes, as success. We present possible indicators for these forms of success and a matrix of factors which influence such success. We then examine these ideas using data gathered from a project that investigated success as experienced by post-school foundation learners in Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The findings suggest that the ideas have value. Finally, we identify some implications for teachers, arguing that, contrary to some current views, all four quadrants in the matrix are the business of teachers.

Keywords:

• student outcomes
• student engagement
• soft outcomes
• skills development

Acknowledgements

We thank the Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics of New Zealand Foundation Education Forum for funding the foundation learning research project and the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative for funding the student retention and student engagement projects used in this article.

We also gratefully acknowledge the contribution our research partners made in both projects. Without your work this article would not have been possible.

We warmly thank the anonymous referees for their constructive feedback.