Neil Harrison Neil.Harrison@uwe.ac.uk
Occasional Associate Lecturer - ACE EDU
Evaluating outreach activities: overcoming challenges through a realist ‘small steps’ approach
Harrison, Neil; Waller, Richard
Authors
Richard Waller Richard.Waller@uwe.ac.uk
Professor of Education and Social Justice
Abstract
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Practitioners are being placed under increasing pressure to evaluate the success of their outreach activities, both by government and by their own universities. Based in a reductionist doctrine of ‘evidence-based practice’, there is a desire to demonstrate the effectiveness and value-for-money across activities that now account for around £175 million per year across England. This article examines some of the difficulties in evaluating the complex social world of outreach and suggests a ‘small steps’ approach to overcome some of these. This uses the idea of a transformative ‘theory of change’ as a framework for understanding the particular contribution made by discrete activities within a wider portfolio, providing a more reliable form of inference than attempts to ‘prove’ impact over longer timeframes.
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Oct 31, 2016 |
Online Publication Date | Dec 5, 2016 |
Publication Date | Jul 3, 2017 |
Deposit Date | Dec 19, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | Jun 5, 2018 |
Journal | Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education |
Print ISSN | 1360-3108 |
Electronic ISSN | 1460-7018 |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis (Routledge) |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 21 |
Issue | 2-3 |
Pages | 81-87 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2016.1256353 |
Keywords | outreach, evaluation, social realism, epistemology |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/904984 |
Publisher URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2016.1256353 |
Additional Information | Additional Information : This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education on 05 December 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13603108.2016.1256353 |
Contract Date | Dec 20, 2016 |
Files
AUA paper - final anon.docx
(41 Kb)
Document
AUA paper - final anon.pdf
(438 Kb)
PDF
You might also like
Towards a typology of debt attitudes among contemporary young UK undergraduates
(2015)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search