
In this insightful post, Dr. Celine Caquineau, a Senior Lecturer at Edinburgh Medical School, tackles the formidable challenge of enhancing student engagement within large undergraduate courses. Focussing on the first-year Medical Biology 1 course, which hosts over 300 students, Dr. Caquineau delves into innovative strategies that foster a sense of ‘mattering’—a crucial aspect of academic well-being and engagement. Inspired by existing research and harnessing the power of structured interactive sessions, she introduces a set of transformative practices aimed at making each student feel valued and integral to the learning community. This post is part of a broader discussion on cultivating meaningful student experiences in higher education, reflecting the university’s commitment to evolving teaching paradigies that recognize and address the diverse needs of students. This post belongs to the Jan-March Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: In-class Perspectives to Engaging and Empowering Learners
Promoting student engagement in a large course is a challenge that many course organisers are struggling to address. Large courses are difficult contexts to establish effective learning communities where each student feels they belong. Large cohorts are diverse, encompassing varied students’ past learning experiences, skills and aspirations. Students often feel anonymous, and getting to know their peers and their teachers is also almost impossible.
As a course organiser for a large UG course (300+ students) in Year 1, named Medical Biology 1 (MB1), I am confronted first-hand to this challenge. The course, compulsory for Biomedical and Medical sciences students, is also open to all students as an elective course and attracts students from all 3 Colleges. Although this course has always overall been well received by students, I have been noticing, over the last 3 years, a drop in lectures attendance, an increase in coursework non-submissions and a decline in exam performance; suggesting that students are disengaging. But how could student engagement be improved in such a challenging context?
Student engagement, sense of belonging and sense of mattering
Student sense of belonging has long been linked with student engagement, well-being and performance. It is defined as students feeling valued, needed and accepted in an environment, as well as a feeling of fitting to that environment. This notion of fit can be problematic, as by definition it will exclude those students who cannot or who do not want to fit. In their powerful talk at the Engage network, Felten and colleagues, proposed to consider the sense of mattering as a more helpful way to think about student belonging at university. Mattering refers to the student belief, whether right or wrong, that they are important to someone else at university (adapted from Schlossberg, 1989). Felten and colleagues argued how mattering makes space for different lived experiences, empowers students to initiate contributions to their learning and helps students to advocate for themselves and others.
Inspired by Felten and colleagues’ presentation, I turned to the vast literature on Mattering to identify ways to promote the students’ sense on mattering in my course as a way to enhance students’ engagement. Guided by Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) and by France & Finney (2010), I established that for students to feel they mattered in MB1, they needed to believe that their presence, voice and actions were key to their learning, the learning of their peers and the overall success of the course.
Conveying the key message “Your presence, voice and contributions matter” to students
Using these 3 guiding stems: Students’ Presence, Voice and Actions, I reviewed the course structure and learning activities and identified ways to apply this key message to the course learning environment and practices. Student-student and student-staff connections were strengthened by encouraging students to get to know each other and by promoting exchanges between students and staff. Student agency was increased by giving students opportunities to choose the Facilitated Group Discussion (FGD) content, and the weightings of the related assessments via whole-class voting sessions. Student representatives from the 3 colleges were also sought to stand for the diversity of the student cohort. Finally, the collaborative nature of learning was emphasised by introducing new group learning activities, such as group exercises during lectures, a new student -led assessment (PeerWise) and a group practical project and assessment.

Were students more engaged?
The redesigned course ran for the first time between January and May 24. Although, one needs to be cautious in interpretating the findings based on one cohort, there were some very encouraging observations. Lecture attendance improved (with around 100 students still attending lectures in Week 8 compared to less than 40 in 2023 for similar class sizes). Students welcomed the voting opportunities to choose what they would learn in the FGD and the weightings of the FGD related assessments (with over 95% students present taking part in the voting). In-course assessment non-submissions dropped to 3% (vs 22% in 2023 and 16% in 2022) and the performance at the exam increased to a 60% average mark (compared to 52% in 2023). 71% of students who completed mid-course feedback felt part of an effective and supportive community. However, some challenges remained. Despite numerous encouragements to students to “use their voice”, engagement with mid -course and end -of -course feedback opportunities remained low.
I didn’t directly ask students whether they felt they mattered in the course, (with hindsight, maybe I should have) and since there is no metrics to effectively “measure” the students’ sense of mattering, I don’t know exactly how student really felt. Yet, student feedback on the course was extremely positive and it is clear that the activities introduced to support the “You matter” message resonated with some, as illustrated by this student’s quote:
I also really liked being able to choose the topics and the weightings for the FGD, this has also increased my engagement as I have felt in control of my own learning.
Lessons learnt
Mattering provided an invaluable and inspiring framework to rethink and restructure my course to improve student engagement. It led to the creation of a clear course ethos (“You matter”) and to the provision of more space and opportunities for students to engage and to feel more empowered in their learning. This example might suggest the need to reframe the current “You belong” student communication towards a more inclusive and achievable “You matter” message.
Finally, large course size often discourages course teams to implement innovative practices. Yet, evidence of what works can only be gathered by experimenting in these realistic albeit challenging contexts. This experience demonstrated that the size of a course should not prevent trying things out. I encourage you all to give it a go!

Credit: Author
References
France, M. K., & Finney, S. J. (2010). Conceptualization and utility of university mattering: A construct validity study. Measurement and Evaluation in Counselling and Development, 43, 48-65.
Rosenberg, M., & McCullough, B. C. (1981). Mattering: Inferred significance and mental health. Research in Community and Mental Health, 2, 163 – 182
Schlossberg, N. K. (1989). Marginality and mattering: Key issues in building community. New Directions for Student Services, 48, 5-15
Link to engage network recordings of Felten and colleagues’ talk: https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/engage+-+Is+%E2%80%98mattering%E2%80%99+a+more+helpful+way+of+thinking+about+student+belonging+at+university/1_xv45vrlp
Celine Caquineau
Dr Celine Caquineau is a Senior Lecturer at the Edinburgh Medical School: Biomedical Sciences and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research interests include learning communities, student -staff partnerships and transnational education.
This is such a helpful post Celine, thank you for sharing this work you have done to use the mattering framework to rethink student engagement in your class.