Are Our Students Engaged in Their Studies? Professional Engagement vs. Study Engagement

Engagement has been shown to contribute to students' success. We used an NSSE-like survey and interviews to examine engagement of students registered in software engineering and information system engineering at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The survey showed BGU students had generally lower engagement in comparison to US students except for in collaborative learning. BGU students lean towards perceiving their studies as a means for professional success rather than for traditional academic success. We attribute the differences between the students and their US counterparts to differences in culture and the age of digital media that allows for multiple ways of learning beyond the university.