Enhancing student engagement in Digital Forensics

In recent years, most research has focused on identifying the key factors in promoting academic success among students in Higher Education. Studies have shown a direct link between levels of engagement and achievement in education. Student engagement represents both the time and energy students invest in educationally purposeful activities and the effort institutions devote to employing effective educational practices. Fredericks identified three dimensions of engagement—behavioural, emotional and cognitive—in the literature and addressed the multiple interpretations of each component. In subject areas such as digital forensics which interfaces between sciences and computing applications, it is vital to look at students’ engagement issues in order to identify significant factors that maximize students' learning experiences throughout their studies. Perhaps, one good definition of skills needed in teaching, learning and curriculum design as well as students engagements during teaching and learning activities in digital forensic would be to highpoint that digital forensics is a combination of different intuition derived from experience and detailed analysis using problem-solving as well as problem-based learning skills. Hence to better understand how to enhance students’ learning through students’ engagements, a set of experiments have been implemented at De Montfort University and Sheffield Hallam University for forensic and security computing students.