With the publication of DMU's full Teaching Excellence Framework report, Professor Susan Orr, DMU's Pro Vice-Chancellor Education and Equalities, looks at what the findings mean for the university.
Educational gain. What is it and how do you measure it?
This topic has perplexed the higher education (HE) sector for many years and there has been considerable investment in research that attempts to pin down this elusive concept.
To me educational gain is all about the journey of learning. At the beginning of a degree students will enrol on to their first module and it is useful to think about all the skills, attributes and knowledge they bring to the table at the point of enrolment. In some areas they might feel really confident while in other areas they may feel like imposters because others in their group appear to know more.
But this is just the start. It is the journey over the next three years that is of central importance to us as educators. How far do our students travel? What do they gain from their university experience beyond the classification outcome? When students walk across the stage at graduation I always want to hear about the story of their educational journey and I enjoy chatting to students after the ceremony.
These stories are about educational gain – even though we might not use this term at the time.
I have been thinking a lot about this because the Office for Students (OfS) has just published our full Teaching Excellence Framework Panel Report.
And it is the idea of educational gain – that journey students make intellectually, emotionally and culturally while they study at university – that we had in our heads as we wrote our TEF submission.
Earlier this year we were told we had received an overall Silver award in the TEF, broken down into a Bronze for the student experience aspect and a Silver for the student outcomes aspect.
But this full report sets out the panel’s rationale for this rating against the TEF criteria, giving us a fuller picture of why we achieved what we did.
One of the more significant reasons we gained a silver rating in student outcomes was for what the TEF panel called our “articulation of educational gain”, an aspect of our submission the panel defined as “outstanding”.
In our submission we linked our conception of educational gain to our mission and strategy as the empowering university. Our model of empowering educational gain brings together a wide range of measures at entry (for example the self-assessment evaluation we invite all new students to complete and our career readiness survey). It also incorporates our evaluations while our students are studying with us (our university student surveys and internship evaluations etc). After graduation we ask our graduates about their experience of studying with us.
At the moment we are working to strengthen and refresh our graduate attributes framework. This will help students identify where they are on their study journey and what their skills and attributes profile looks like. This work will help our students articulate their educational gain to themselves and to their future employers.
Anyone who knows me knows I find it hard to resist a hiking metaphor but it works perfectly for educational gain. If I think about a recent hike I completed in Andalucía I could tell you the miles I walked. But while there is a number, it was the experience that enriched me, it was the environment, the culture and the people. What I also valued was that this particular hike really stretched me; at times it was a very hard slog in very hot sun. But what pride I felt when I finished the hike!
This is what I think about when I think about this mini break. Similarly, in the context of a university degree the classification is very important, there is no denying this, but the richness of the experience and the way our degree opportunities helped students to do things they didn’t think they were capable of – that, for me, is educational gain. To quote from our submission:
We empower our students, staff and the local community by creating a diverse and welcoming learning environment where people feel comfortable exploring the boundaries of what they can achieve.
Posted on Monday 18 December 2023