Evaluating the learning gain of students is a Teaching Excellence Framework metric and current proposals are to collect data from existing national sources including the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education and the National Student Survey.
The Higher Education Funding Council for England has considered more focussed models defining learning gain as the distance travelled by a student in terms of skills competencies knowledge and development.
A novel alternative perspective is now proposed in which learning gain is presented as being a two-dimensional paradigm including both the distance travelled (explicit knowledge) and the journey travelled (tacit understanding) gained by the student.
A qualitative research study was undertaken at Bournemouth University using a small-scale pilot to investigate this concept. Initial results yielded promising data and provided a potential model for evaluating student learning. Further development work is now being undertaken with a larger test group of students.
