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Institution level awarding gap metrics for identifying educational inequity: useful tools or reductive distractions?

Hubbard, Katharine

Authors

Katharine Hubbard



Abstract

Equity is increasingly seen as a core value for Higher Education systems around the world. (In)equity is often measured through construction of achievement gaps, quantifying the relative outcomes of two populations of students. Institution-level gaps are embedded in the policy landscape of HE, becoming performance metrics in their own right. These gap metrics increasingly inform the actions of governments, regulators, institutions and educators. This theoretical article scrutinises the technical and conceptual construction of achievement gaps through using the dominant UK conception of the institution level degree classification ‘awarding gap’. Drawing on Adam’s Equity Theory of Motivation, Rawls’s Distributive Justice and the Capability Approach as theoretical perspectives, I highlight multiple structural weaknesses in the conception of the awarding gap. I illustrate the implications of this metric by analysing simulated awarding gap data for a fictional institution, and through the perspectives of five idealised stakeholders. I identify multiple technical and theoretical limitations of the institution level awarding gap metric, including examples where the threshold based nature of the awarding gap fails to capture statistical differences between groups, thereby undermining its utility in identifying inequity. I call on the sector to develop metrics that more accurately capture (in)equity of outcomes and align better with theoretical frameworks, thereby creating more powerful explanatory metrics that can inform meaningful action.

Citation

Hubbard, K. (2024). Institution level awarding gap metrics for identifying educational inequity: useful tools or reductive distractions?. Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01216-y

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 18, 2024
Online Publication Date Apr 15, 2024
Publication Date 2024
Deposit Date Mar 25, 2024
Publicly Available Date Apr 22, 2024
Journal Higher Education
Print ISSN 0018-1560
Publisher Springer Verlag
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-024-01216-y
Keywords Equity; Achievement gap; Awarding gap; Higher education policy; Student outcome metrics
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4611224

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2024.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.







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