Evaluating Student Equity Initiatives: A Student-Centred Approach

The robust evaluation of student equity initiatives is now an expected activity in Australian universities. This paper reports on the development of Swinburne’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) Evaluation Framework in which the project team adopted a student-centred de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Student Success
Main Authors: Nadine Zacharias, Sadie Heckenberg, Laura Kostanski, Melissa Lowe, Jeff Waters
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Queensland University of Technology 2024
Subjects:
program evaluation
student equity
first nations students
Theory and practice of education
LB5-3640
First Nations
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5204/ssj.3554
https://doaj.org/article/f1f456a46cf04b7696ddc70cc24ff827
Description
Summary:The robust evaluation of student equity initiatives is now an expected activity in Australian universities. This paper reports on the development of Swinburne’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) Evaluation Framework in which the project team adopted a student-centred design approach. The needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students were positioned at the heart of the methodology and provided the starting point of explorations of student experiences in interviews and focus groups. We found that psychosocial support activities were critical to Indigenous students and those from low socioeconomic statue and/or regional or remote backgrounds and identified several additional Outcome factors of equity programs. Furthermore, we propose ‘Prosperity’ as a new Impact factor for evaluating equity programs to capture a broader notion of ‘success’. We argue that insights from existing institutional evaluation frameworks need to complement the Student Equity in Higher Education Evaluation Framework (SEHEEF) as Australia’s national framework and inform its continuous improvement.

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