Report
24 September 2024
Summary
Data collected by higher education providers can be used to identify equality gaps and help in the design and evaluation of strategies to reduce these gaps.
TASO’s Institutional data use project involved working with higher education providers to use institutional data to support better evaluation of the student experience, and to explore opportunities for evaluations that will deliver type 2 (correlational) or, preferably, type 3 (causal) evidence.
We worked with an evaluation team from Staffordshire University and four higher education providers to evaluate their post-entry student success initiatives using institutional data:
- Peer Assisted Learning programme (University of East Anglia) – a programme of structured mentoring of first year students by students in higher years.
- Score As I Learn (University of Huddersfield) – weekly online assessments that contribute to final module marks, intended to encourage sustained engagement throughout a module.
- Lancaster Success Programme (Lancaster University) – a programme designed to empower students from widening participation backgrounds to fulfil their potential through a variety of personalised, coaching-led development activities.
- Black Leadership Programme (Nottingham Trent University) – aimed at encouraging Black students in their second year to take part in skill-enhancement sessions, interactive engagements and community-building events.
All these initiatives were associated with some positive impact on student outcomes. However, due to limitations in the available data, none of the impact evaluations produced type 3 (causal) evidence.
We worked with higher education provider staff from the universities to identify why there are data limitations, and what the barriers and facilitators are to using institutional data to evaluate student success.
Through this work, we have developed a set of recommendations and two new resources which will help higher education providers develop and use their institutional data more effectively when evaluating student success.
Recommendations
- At a senior level, staff with responsibility for Access and Participation Plans (APPs) to have an understanding of evaluation and have input into decisions concerning the associated infrastructure required to facilitate evaluation.
- Establish a dedicated ethical approval process for evaluation of APP work (including the analysis of institutional data).
- Centralise the access to institutional data.
- Use the framework provided by the post-entry Mapping Outcomes and Activities Tool (MOAT) to identify outcome measures, record student support activities and track their use.