The Investment Of Minority Students In Colleges And Universities And Its Impact On Learning Gains

Student engagement is the measure of time and effort in students’ individual learning and effective education activities, as well as how students perceive their support for their studies, whose essence is the interaction between the students’behavior and school conditions[1]. It is an important standard to measure the quality of education in universities whether students can take part in kinds of education activities effectively. At present, the domestic research on students’ engagement focus on the characteristics, existing problems and influencing factors. The objects usually are general university students, which is helpful for us to learn the overall condition of the quality of higher education centering on students. However, studying on ethnic minority students’ student engagement is pretty rare. Ethnic minority students is an important group of college students, there is still a big gap between the knowledge base and Chinese level among the majority of students. These characteristics determine its unique development characteristics during the college. Strengthening the research on ethnic minority students’ engagement level, analyzing their learning experiences and characteristics of learning harvesting and the factors of affecting ethnic minority college students’ study or development, are helpful to diagnose the problems of higher education, promote the reform and improvement of education quality evaluation system, and promote the development of national education.By reviewing the literature, it simply shows the results of research on students’ engagement at home and abroad. Under the education ideas of student-oriented, the student engagement have an significant impact on learning outcomes. Based on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) which is centering on students and accepted and used by many countries these years, We take S-university which is the training base of ethnic minority preparatory education in northwest regions as research object, and analyze the ethnic minority student engagement and the status and characteristics of Chinese language proficiency and academic achievement by the way of questionnaire and interview. Besides, we reveal quantitatively the deep relationship between the three variables, which provides data support for improving the education quality of ethnic universities.According to the research results, we get the following conclusions:(1)The ethnic minority students in S-university have the different levels by five indicators of student engagement. According to their score ranking order the supportive campus environment is the highest, the enriching education experience is higher, but the level of student-faculty interaction is the lowest. (2)There is a positive correlation between student engagement and learning outcomes. It is to say, the more student engagement, the more students’ harvest and the more education quality. The five dimensions of student engagement scale are also positively related to academic achievement. (3)Boy’s student engagement level is higher than girls’. (4)For the ethnic minority university students, it showed a significant positive correlation between the level of Chinese level and learning outcomes. The students with a better level of Chinese usually get more learning outcomes than the poor’s. (5)The supportive campus environment not only has the direct positive impact to study harvest but also has indirect positive effect on academic achievement by students’ active student engagement (enriching education experience, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction). However, the level of academic challenge has little direct impact on the learning outcomes.At last, based on the research on the status of student engagement, we analyze the learning rules and characteristics of ethnic minority university students, extract the educational factors that affect student engagement and learning outcomes, build the equation model of influencing factors, and put forward specific suggestions.