Abstract
‘Learning gain’ has become an increasingly prominent concept in debates about the effectiveness of higher education across OECD countries. In England, interest has been heightened by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’s major research initiative on learning gain, launched in 2015, and by the new Teaching Excellence Framework which assesses learning and teaching and student outcomes. HEFCE’s novel research initiative has funded a set of experimental projects across the English higher education sector for the first time. This paper presents preliminary findings from one such project at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The project trials and evaluates three approaches to identifying and measuring learning gain using data from cohorts of students across different discipline areas during 2015–2016 and 2016–2017. It builds upon previous work carried out at UEA in developing self-efficacy assessments and applying concept inventories. Student marks provide a simple comparator as a third approach to measuring learning gain.
Highlights
‘Learning gain’ has become increasingly prominent in debates about higher education provision and student achievement over recent years
University of East Anglia (UEA), a percentage system is used for the award of marks on taught programmes, with marks awarded for individual pieces of assessment aggregated first at module level and by year of study, with an established algorithm used for the conversion into a final percentage which feeds a calculation of higher degree classification (HDC) against the traditional categories of first class, upper second class, lower second class, third class and fail
It seems unlikely that the sector will abandon this traditional method of expressing a final degree outcome in favour of Grade Point Average (GPA), despite the Higher Education Academy (HEA)’s extensive project on GPA (HEA, 2015)
Summary
‘Learning gain’ has become increasingly prominent in debates about higher education provision and student achievement over recent years. KEYWORDS Learning gain in higher education; students marks; Grade Point Average (GPA); self-efficacy; concept inventories
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