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Research & Statistics

PRESENTATIONS & PUBLICATIONS

Measures of Student Progress and Outcomes

Purpose

The Measures of Student Progress and Outcomes project was launched by the Commission in 2008 to help fulfill its mandate to assist institutions and governments in enhancing the post-secondary learning environment. The development of measures responds to a rising demand among the Commission's stakeholders for enhanced standardized statistics informing key questions about the post-secondary sector. Going beyond notions of league tables and a narrow definition of accountability, this drive for measures focuses on enhancing the quality of the educational process and the support of its ongoing improvement, which clearly is the MPHEC's primary orientation.

While this project does not aim to define quality, the fact is that certain dimensions of quality can and should be measured. The measures developed under this project will be valuable to institutions in their continuous quality improvement, to governments in providing accountability and transparency, and finally to students, their families and the general public.

Approach

The measures developed and adopted must address these key considerations: relevance to Commission stakeholders, comparability with other jurisdictions, and feasibility (can be produced from existing, in-house data sources such as the Post-secondary Student Information System [PSIS] and the MPHEC's Graduate Outcome survey).

Deliverables

The project deliverables are modular, with each module consisting of a set of measures grouped to inform a single policy theme. Each module or set of measures is released separately along with a document providing context and policy implications. Taken together, the modules inform the broader project theme of student progress and outcomes.

The policy themes under which measures have been developed are:

• Persistence and graduation,
• Time-to-degree,
• Course load, term-to-term persistence, and stop-outs, and
• Graduate outcomes (such as employment, further study, mobility and satisfaction).