A project at Sheffield Hallam aimed to conduct cognitive interviews with students as part of the development of a questionnaire to evaluate teaching and learning. This blog post will complement existing recommendations on ‘Doing fieldwork in a pandemic’ (e.g. Lupton, 2020) by considering whether technology can be utilised as a viable alternative to in-person participation for conducting cognitive interviews, such as by using phones and web-based video conferencing.
This third blog post covers the use of evidence and evaluation to inform the design of initiatives and the use of theories of change to structure this process. The previous posts in this series have focused on an overview of the approach adopted at Hallam to build an evaluative mindset and the strategic context of evaluation at the institution.
The SRHE Annual Conference ran from the 11th to the 13th of December with a focus on creativity and criticality in higher education. Dr Liz Austen and Dr Emma Heron showcased two methodologies which have been developed and implemented at Hallam. Liz focused on digital storytelling and provided an overview of how this method could be used to access hidden student voices. Emma led on her work to develop the Listening Rooms methodology and explored the method and impact of an institutional listening approach.
Within Hallam’s Access and Participation Plan (APP), the institution has outlined its commitment to develop and maintain a more sustainable evaluative culture. The strategic context of the APP is to eliminate inequality in Higher Education particularly for underrepresented groups, but the approach at Hallam is broader. We aim to ensure...
STEER has always had an evaluative function. This has included support for the delivery of the current Access Agreement (2019-2020), and the newly approved Access and Participation Plan 20-25 (APP). The Office for Students states that...
This blog challenges those working within HE to utilise their pedagogic knowledge to design focus groups which actively engage the participants, in the same way that we might adopt strategies for engagement in our teaching: 1) Using caricature to animate creative and critical pedagogic thinking; 2) Using game playing as effective pedagogic research; 3) Using multi-modal visual methods for storytelling; 4) Using integrative review for exploring complex phenomena.
There is considerable evidence – and probably much more that goes under-reported – of high levels of student non-response rates to surveys within higher education. Several reasons have been identified as pivotal, including: those students with a record of lower performance are less likely to respond; those not appreciating the relevance or ‘salience’ of a survey are also less likely to respond; students experiencing what is known as ‘survey fatigue’ i.e. being over-surveyed will also be far less likely to engage. Put those three aspects together and a perfect storm of non-response is created. And yet, we still see surveys as a robust way of gathering useful evidence and they often dominate as a research methodology involving students….
Liz Austen from STEER presented the various ways that student voice is researched in Higher Education, before providing examples of the digital storytelling method. Stories which were produced as part of a project with the Yorkshire Universities group were shown and discussed, alongside the ethical dimensions of the narrative process...
I have always been interested in researching marginalised and hidden populations, especially individuals or groups whose voices are not heard or differ from normalised discourses. This comes from my background in criminal justice and researching how...
I am a Level 5 undergraduate student on work placement in the directorate of Student Engagement, Evaluation and Research. As part of my work, I have looked at Summary Report on ‘Student engagement in the context of commuter students‘ by Liz Thomas Associates and Robert Jones which captures both student and staff representations of student engagement...