WELLBEING
“ KAN is an opportunity to be in a network of likeminded people and a way to expand my knowledge about university .”
( KAN student , July 2023 Survey )
The 2022 cohort , their first year
From our Likert Scale surveys we can see an increase in the number of students that strongly agree that they would like to study at university ( sixty-nine to seventy-seven percent ) that KAN helps them feel more confident ( thirty-eight to sixty-nine percent ) and that they feel supported by their KAN network ( forty-six to sixty-nine percent ). Contrastingly , the percentage of students reporting that they know what they need to do to apply to university has stayed the same . This may reflect the young age of the students or perhaps
Nonetheless , the data is not all positive . For the ImpactEd evaluation we have seen decreases in the other three measures , which were self-efficacy , extraversion , and motivation . As this is a small data set , I was able to observe that many of the students whose scores went down have faced some significant challenges in the past academic year . Also , when discussing the evaluation with colleagues at ImpactEd we talked about the lack of a control group and other factors that may come into play , such as the socio-economic and political situation now compared to this time last year . That said , I hope to be able to tailor upcoming KAN events to really build on these areas and improve the support we give our students . The great thing about continuous impact evaluation for a long-term programme such as KAN is that the data and feedback can immediately be converted into meaningful action points .
Reflections on measuring flourishing
2023 marks KAN ’ s tenth anniversary and in just four years ’ time we will have a community of over one-hundred alumni . One thing that is clear is that our qualitative feedback is continuously superlative . Time after time , students and current alumni express how impactful KAN has been for them in a whole myriad of ways . It is interesting to me that there is a slight contrast between this first rigorous attempt at quantitative impact measurement and the vast number the reason may be that by increasing their knowledge of university options we have made the students more aware of the unknowns . Either way , over the next three years of the course we will hopefully see a gradual rise in students strongly agreeing or agreeing that they know what to do in order to apply to university . In terms of agency , the ImpactEd survey ( a tool that uses academically validated measures that are bench-marked against national statistics ) we saw a small overall increase in the results for student goal orientation (+ 0.5 %).
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