StudentSurvey.ie (Irish Survey of Student Engagement)
StudentSurvey.ie (the Irish Survey of Student Engagement or ISSE) is managed as a collaborative partnership by the HEA, IUA, THEA and USI. It is designed to inform developments within institutions while also providing a national set of data. The survey asks students about their experiences of higher education and is open to first year, final year undergraduate, and taught postgraduate students. Fieldwork takes place in February - March annually and more than 240,000 students have taken part nationally since the survey began in 2013.
Its main purpose is to provide benefits to each institution and its students by helping to improve feedback and appropriate follow-up action. Objectives identified include:
- To increase transparency in relation to the student experience of and engagement with higher education.
- To enable direct student input in expressing their experience and engagement with their higher education institution.
- To facilitate higher education institutions’ efforts to reflect that engagement and those experiences in their policy and practice in an impactful way.
- To help institutions identify areas of strength in how students engage, so they can continue and strengthen these practices.
- To help institutions identify areas requiring further development or improvement in how students engage so they can respond.
- To serve as a guide for continual enhancement of institutions’ teaching and learning and student engagement.
- To facilitate comparison with other higher education systems nationally, sectorally and internationally.
A companion survey, PGR StudentSurvey.ie, has been developed to capture the experiences of postgraduate research students (Masters by Research and Doctoral programmes). The first non-pilot fieldwork took place in 2019. The PGR survey runs in alternate years, with the most recent fieldwork in 2023.
Full details of both surveys, including results, are available at studentsurvey.ie.
