How Higher Education Can Evaluate Innovation’s Impact and More Precisely Scale Student Support
By: Mark David Milliron,David Kil,Laura Malcolm,Grace Gee
Rigorously evaluating the impact of innovative student success initiatives is key in meeting institutional goals for student outcomes, resource allocation, and return on investment.
From Volume 45 Number 4 | July–September 2017
Abstract: Institutions are managing numerous student success initiatives simultaneously, but they lack the necessary data and infrastructure to evaluate outcomes. They also struggle to clearly link a particular initiative to a specific individual outcome. Using prediction-based propensity score matching (PPSM), a methodology compliant with the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse’s requirements, we facilitated the analysis of key initiatives to measure efficacy, ensuring that outcomes of students participating are compared to control students with similar propensity. The recent work explored in this article helps two institutions understand the impact of their innovation and more precisely scale student support.
