Student Engagement Strategies in Health Professions Education
Summary
Student engagement in health professions education encompasses a spectrum of cognitive, affective, behavioural, agentic and socio-cultural dimensions. Effective strategies integrate active learning, collaborative inquiry and reflective practice to foster deeper understanding and professional identity formation. Methods range from problem-based learning and simulation-based activities to flipped classrooms, virtual patient interactions and interprofessional projects. Engagement is further enhanced through timely feedback, peer mentoring, and community-based initiatives that connect academic content with clinical realities. Digital platforms and learning analytics enable real-time monitoring of participation, while longitudinal mentorship and student governance opportunities promote agency. Holistic measurement approaches combine self-report instruments, direct observation and learning analytics to capture the multifaceted nature of engagement. Globally, these strategies have been adapted to diverse cultural and resource settings, demonstrating practicality in both high-tech and low-resource environments. The cumulative evidence underscores that sustained investment in interactive, learner-centred pedagogies cultivates resilience, self-efficacy and collaborative competencies essential for contemporary health practice.
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Student Engagement Strategies in Health Professions Education publication trend
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Technical terms
Agentic engagement: Active contribution by learners in shaping their instructional experience and educational choices.
Socio-cultural engagement: Participation that reflects students’ interaction with diverse cultural and social contexts within the learning environment.
Virtual patient: Computer-based simulation of clinical scenarios used to develop diagnostic and decision-making skills.
Flipped classroom: Instructional model in which preparatory content is studied independently and classroom time is devoted to interactive problem solving.
References
- Measurement of student engagement in health professions education: a review of literature. BMC Medical Education (2023).
- Factors influencing study engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-sectional study among health and social professions students. PLOS ONE (2021).
- How do they learn: types and characteristics of medical and healthcare student engagement in a simulation-based learning environment. BMC Medical Education (2021).
- Development and initial validation of an online engagement metric using virtual patients. BMC Medical Education (2018).
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