Co-creating Success through Evaluation Design: The Research Project Unit in the Media School, UAL

This presentation outlines a case study of a level six Research Project unit undertaken by four courses in the Communications and Media Programme at UAL. It illustrates a way of building success, in partnership with students, through evaluative methods that are embedded into the unit. This built an understanding of student experience, confidence and learning, helping to pinpoint what was working during the student journey. In particular the project focused on inclusive ways to capture qualitative information and explored how evaluation design can enhance the impact of pedagogic interventions.

Using varieties of qualitative research and evaluation has been noted as significant among TEF gold awardees (Moore et al. 2023). We developed an evaluative framework from an education enhancement research project. This led to a three-step process that includes evaluation design, a toolkit of resources for data collection and analysis stage.

The toolkit built on key Advance HE and QAA themes such as evidence for enhancement and impact (Austen et al 2021), student engagement for partnership (Healey and Healey 2019) and building knowledge from an iterative cycle of evaluative practice (Thomas, 2017); it is aligned to OfS approaches to self-evaluation and concepts of dynamic evaluation (Mazzucato, 2025).

The engagement with students throughout the unit builds on the centrality of capturing student voice and co-creation (Bovill, C., 2020, Cook-Sather, A., 2020); it also considers aspects of creative evaluation (Gunn et al 2021) for inclusivity. By collating evaluative information, while the unit is in progress, it has helped staff understand key success factors and what needs to pivot.

The case study illustrates:

1) Gathering qualitative information in an inclusive and on-going way
2) Making touch points for data collection meaningful to students
3) Ensuring embedded approach to gathering student voices that is flexible and adaptable by staff depending on context
4) Working with students to identify journey bottlenecks and pain points
5) Developing new ideas with students throughout the evaluation
6) Building staff and student confidence in having open conversations with students

We will show how the evaluative process
• used a variety of different tools such as mentimeter, journey mapping, dashboards and advice cards to examine different aspects of the unit
• collected 192 data points throughout the unit from a wide range of students
• led to annual improvements (e.g. on attainment) and innovations year on year
• developed writing retreats as an effective intervention
• embedded success through sharing the evidence-base with all staff.

This will be of interest to those involved in teaching and learning looking to develop their own robust evaluations for their educational enhancements, developing scalable, inclusive evaluation processes at the local level, and building an evidence base.

Takeaways focus on empowering staff to design and implement evaluations; it will present some practical, creative and varied tools that might be helpful for capturing information in a different way. The aim is to show that we have found evaluation can be flexible and positive way to capture evidence of impact and effectiveness, aligned to Advance HE commitments to enhancing student success.