November 2025
A New Foundation: Four Research-Backed Principles to Re-Engage Today's College Students
Most teaching centers offer faculty training in each of these areas, but a meta-synthesis reveals four most important core principles for student engagement and success for all of our current student learning challenges. I present each principle, followed by some concrete strategies for following these principles. These strategies are only illustrative since there are many more strategies for each principle that educational developers can help their own faculty choose from to match particular teaching contexts and faculty strengths.
Create a Culture of Belonging
A sense of belonging is a fundamental building block for all students, enabling them to engage in higher-order thinking. For non-dominant student groups—such as first-generation, international, or racial and ethnic minority students—this is even more critical. These students often face a steeper challenge in finding a sense of belonging in higher education. Thus, fostering inclusion is essential for their ability to thrive and engage in complex thought.
Here are three key strategies to support a culture of belonging in the college classroom:
- Warmth and connection. Here are some examples: warm syllabus language, required student hours ("office hours"), examples that connect to students, and
- Collaborative learning. Provide multiple opportunities for students to collaborate, from brief in-class exercises to longer projects. Collaborative learning is an especially effective strategy for students of color, first-generation students, and Gen Z learners. It creates an inclusive, supportive environment that leads to improved learning results for these groups.
- Growth Culture. Give frequent formative assignments and include growth-oriented feedback. For example, preface feedback by saying that you have high expectations and believe in the student's potential to meet those expectations.
Give Students Choices
When students have choices in learning experiences, they invest more energy in their work. This choice is especially important for students with disabilities, neurodivergent students, most Gen Z learners, and for encouraging academic integrity over AI shortcuts. Providing student choice is part of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which emphasizes using multiple means of motivating students, delivering content, and receiving student expression of learning.
Here are 3 strategies to increase student choice:
- Give students autonomy in their learning. Inviting students to choose attendance and difficult assessments motivates students to engage more deeply in their learning.
- Allow flexibility in how students show their learning. If the learning outcome for an assignment does not necessitate a specific product (e.g., a paper in a writing class), give students multiple options, such as a podcast, report, or speech. This flexibility significantly improves motivation and academic integrity.
- Give students a choice in texts. Provide a list of articles or other texts for students to choose from, inviting their feedback on which texts they want to read.
Connect Content to Students
Connecting course content to students' future vocations, personal interests, or real-world experiential work engages students in deeper learning and is especially critical for students of color, Gen Z learners, and international students.
Here are three strategies:
- Connect assignment topics and activities to students. Create assignments that encourage students to apply your content to their interests or future vocational aspirations.
- Connect lecture content to students. Make your content stick by connecting it to your students' lives. Weave in examples that are familiar and relevant to them. The more you know about the students in your classroom, the better you can tailor your examples and bridge the gap between abstract concepts and real-world application.
- Use competency-based assignments. By shifting skill-based assignments to a competency pass/fail assessment, students more clearly see how that assignment connects to their academic or career goals, which increases motivation and academic integrity. For example, assign metacognitive reflections on short readings, giving students feedback on their first reflection before they revise it or drop one assignment.
Create Clarity and Transparency
All students benefit from clarity and transparency in course and assignment designs, but students who are from marginalized backgrounds, ethnicities, or identities (including international students) show significant gains in learning when faculty use clear, transparent processes and instructions. Clarity and consistency in where assignments are located in the LMS, when assignments are due, and the expectations for completing assignments reduces anxiety and procrastination and improves motivation.
Here are three core strategies to enhance clarity and transparency:
- Make every assignment clear: The TILT Framework is the best model for making sure your expectations for content, process, and assessment are clear to students. The assignment component most often missing is the why: why students benefit from this assignment, how it connects to the learning outcomes, and what they will gain from doing it.
- Scaffold hard concepts. Identify the most difficult concepts (often Threshold Concepts), and provide scaffolding such as multiple examples, repetition, concept maps, and explicitly name those ideas that are incorrect but often believed.
- Clearly identify upcoming work and expectations. The most important strategy for increasing academic honesty and supporting Gen Z, first-gen, and international student success is to provide consistent clarity of work expectations. For example, keep an online calendar of upcoming assignments (e.g., in the LMS), and provide students with scaffolds for difficult assignments.
If you have questions about any of these ideas or strategies, I would love to connect with you! You can email me at bjbird@owu.edu or stop by my office in the Smith Center: University Hall 104.
