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News24 September 2024

New resources to help colleges and universities make better use of data when evaluating student support initiatives  

Working with four universities and an independent evaluation team, TASO has produced a set of resources that will help higher education providers harness the power of institutional data when evaluating post-entry student support interventions.
Institutional data

Working with four universities and an independent evaluation team, TASO has produced a set of resources that will help higher education providers harness the power of institutional data when evaluating post-entry student support interventions.

Today – as part of its institutional data use project  – TASO has launched:

The project looks at how universities and colleges can use data to improve evaluation of post-entry activities for narrowing equality gaps.

Many higher education providers offer interventions and activities such as transition and academic skills support, and mentoring to improve student success and reduce equality gaps. As part of this, a wide range of data is collected, such as student demographics, class attendance, interaction with virtual learning environments, and attainment. This institutional data can be used to evaluate the success of these interventions.

To help the higher education sector use institutional data to generate evidence about which post-entry interventions are effective, in December 2023 TASO appointed the University of East Anglia, the University of Huddersfield, Lancaster University and Nottingham Trent University as partners in its institutional data use project.

Standardised coding of data and institutional tracking of the use of support services will facilitate better evaluation and enable the most effective approaches to working with students facing barriers to success in higher education to be adopted. This project aims to contribute to the evidence base and support the sector in carrying out comprehensive evaluations of post-entry interventions.

We partnered with a team from Staffordshire Centre of Learning and Pedagogic Practice at Staffordshire University to be the independent evaluator for the project.

The evaluator has developed an Enhanced Theory of Change for each provider’s chosen post-entry intervention, which describes in detail each of the student success activities, and the associated change mechanisms and causal pathways. We have also published the associated evaluation protocols and evaluation reports and implementation and process evaluations. The interventions are:

Find out more about our institutional data use project and read the final report.