Context
Career Wise has developed its own framework for cleaning the data that has been amassed over the past 20 years working in the student support and funding industry. The framework incorporates definitions that have been developed within the National Bursary Support Providers Forum in order to communicate common measures in presenting statistics in this line of work. Career Wise is a founding member of the forum and strictly adheres to the proposed best practices developed in the forum. Further to that Career Wise data models have been developed to visualize the data and tell a story about progress and success on the various programmes that are administered by Career Wise.
Proposed Indicators
Logical Maps
The logical maps show where terms are used and how they relate to one another.
Definitions
- Start Year – The year a student started their current programme, including related programme changes.
- Cohot – A group of students constituted by the given year in which they enrolled for a particular higher education programme.
- Award Cohot – A group of students defined by the year in which they became beneficiaries of the bursary support organisation – no matter their year of academic study.
- Proceed / Progress – This is the activity of students moving from one academic year to the next – no matter if they are carrying courses or not.
- Year on Year Progression Rate – The proportion of all students who are being supported by an organisation who pass sufficient courses to progress to the next academic year – whether or not they are carrying modules. The progression rate includes students who graduate. It is expressed as a simple percentage of all who started each year.
- Throughput – The proportion of all students in an award cohort (the year they started being supported by an organisation) who graduated while still being supported by that organisation – no matter how long they took to do so.
- Cohot (longitudinal) studies – As undertaken in the sector focus on ultimate student outcomes of their undergraduate studies. They comprise tracking all students who started studying in a given year and who had been supported by an organisation – no matter for how long; they tell the students’ stories from academic year 1.
Definitions are taken from the National Bursary Support Providers Forum, Sub-Report: Academic Outcomes – Terms used in the bursary support provider sector when measuring academic outcomes: Towards developing common usage / definitions.