Blog15 May 2025
Since we released the post-entry Mapping Outcomes and Activities Tool (MOAT) in May 2024 we have received feedback from practitioners and evaluators.
Through workshops held as part of our ‘Institutional data use’ project we identified several uses of the post-entry MOAT:
- To provide an overview of the student support work in terms of outcomes, the student groups targeted by the activities and where there are gaps or, even, overprovision
- As an evaluation planning resource
- A common language to aid communication of student success work within and across providers
- Used in conjunction with student-tracking databases – for example, Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT), East Midlands Widening Participation Research and Evaluation Partnership (EMWPREP) – for evaluation within and across providers.
As a What Works Centre, TASO developed the MOAT to aid evaluation. When providers consistently code their student success activities and record how students interact with them, this facilitates measuring impact within and across the sector.
Coding activities in action: a case study from Nottingham Trent University
But how do providers even get started on coding their activities and recording them on dedicated systems to facilitate evaluation?
At Nottingham Trent University (NTU), Bec Aeddie and Laura Hope, have addressed this issue by providing guidance on how to categorise post-entry student support activities, and how to record them on the HEAT database.
Their experience in categorising and recording NTU’s post-entry activities has been distilled into a case study (PDF). The first part covers decisions around the inclusion criteria for post-entry activities, where to find information about them, and what data to record. The second part covers considerations for recording and tracking student interactions with such activities on a suitable database, in this case HEAT.
To enable the discovery, classification and recording of activities on a suitable system the authors make the following recommendations:
- A standard operating procedure should be adopted to facilitate the collection of activity and participant data.
- The process for classifying activity types, sub-types and intended outcomes should be kept as simple, clear and concise as possible.
- The user experience of submitting the information about the activities and participants should be as streamlined as possible.
- Intended outcomes should be assigned during theory of change development.
Use the post-entry tool
You can find our post-entry MOAT, an intervention-recording worksheet and some guidance on our MOAT resources page.