Towards measures of longitudinal learning gain in UK higher education: the challenge of meaningful engagement

ABSTRACT

Learning gain is considered to be the distance travelled by students in terms of skills, competencies, content knowledge and personal development. This article discusses the administration experience and tests results from a first year cohort of 675 students at the University of Lincoln who undertook a self-assessment and standardised psychometric test as part of a project to develop measures of learning gain in UK higher education. The tests themselves are shown to be potentially suitable for this purpose however the biggest challenge was student participation and engagement. Various approaches to improve engagement were trialled. Whilst some of these approaches are shown to increase the number of responses, there is no evidence that they increase meaningful task engagement, leading to the conclusion that until this challenge is addressed the validity of learning gain data from bespoke tests is potentially questionable and the value of participation to students as individuals is limited.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning gain
• self-assessment
• standardised psychometric tests
• student engagement

Notes

1. Significance of trends was assessed using standard two tail t tests to compare sample means between different groups of students assuming equal variance. Data is reported throughout this article giving mean, standard deviation (sd), t statistic (t), degrees of freedom (df) and p value (p). T tests were selected for this purpose as they provide an accessible means of summarising the data at this initial exploratory analysis stage.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) Grant number [G0177/ILIN01/LG1516].