Report | Piloting methods to develop better evidence on student support

_{9 November 2023}

Summary

TASO’s report on What works to reduce equality gaps for disabled students suggests there is a need for more and better evaluation of interventions to address inequalities for disabled students in higher education. Similarly, TASO’s report on What works to reduce equality gaps in employment and employability found that the evidence base is relatively weak in terms of that which can help understand impact.

This project aimed to learn more about the approaches that could be used to develop the sort of evidence base that is needed, by piloting evaluation methods that are less commonly used in the higher education sector. 

Four higher education providers were partnered with an independent evaluation organisation to conduct pilot evaluations of interventions they are delivering in areas which show evidence of promise and which would benefit from robust evaluation. 

These evaluations aimed to generate empirical enquiry evidence (whereby the data suggests that an activity is associated with better outcomes for students) and scope out the feasibility of generating causality evidence (which demonstrates that an activity has a causal impact on outcomes for students).

The four higher education providers involved in the project were:

• University of Exeter – evaluating their Access to Internships programme
• University of Brighton – evaluating their mentoring programme
• London School of Economics – evaluating disabled students career appointments
• University of Central Lancashire – evaluating their Student Wellbeing Ambassadors programme.

The resulting evaluations provide valuable case studies of how propensity score matching and contribution analysis (the two evaluation methods used) might be used in this context, and the report sets out reflections on how these approaches worked in practice and a summary of other evaluation methods which were scoped out as possible improvements and extensions to the existing evaluations.

Read the report