Educational gain: Why bother?
Written by Bee Bond, Agne Kocnevaite
In this blog, Bee Bond (LITE Strategic Lead for Student Futures & Educational Gain) and Agne Kocnevaite (LITE Higher Education Research Support Officer) explore what ‘educational gain’ means, and whether a static, consistent definition matters.
A provocation
The question we have most frequently asked and been asked since taking on our Strategic Lead and Research Officer roles in LITE is: ‘So what exactly is educational gain?’
In this blog, we argue that the real work lies not in chasing an elusive, perfect definition - because let’s be honest, it doesn’t exist. Instead, the work lies in embracing the complexity of practice and shifting our focus to the question itself. Our focus is not on providing an irrefutable definition, but on exploring how concepts of educational gain might vary for different students, disciplines, faculties and universities. We suggest it is more important that we keep asking the question than that we find an answer to it.
But what is educational gain, really? The official response
The term ‘educational gain’ was introduced as a key point of evaluation in the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). There was no single, universally agreed definition of educational gain - the Office for Students (OfS) deliberately left it open for institutions to define themselves. The broad understanding of educational gain refers to the overall progress or benefit that students experience throughout their time in higher education. This often includes academic, personal, and social development. The working definition created by the University of Leeds, specifically for the TEF, was:
"Educational gain means the knowledge, skills and cultural intelligence that will empower our students to navigate their futures and address the opportunities and challenges they will encounter in the world.
"To help them realise the full benefit of studying within our vibrant community, we encourage and support our students to develop self-awareness, so they are able to reflect on their learning and make the most of he wealth of opportunities available to them."
Educational Enhancement and Student Experience Committee (2025)
However, the lack of a standardised definition and no agreement or real understanding around how this nebulous concept could be measured, evaluated or evidenced made national comparison difficult, and ultimately led to educational gain being dropped from the TEF.
So, why bother thinking about it?
Despite much of our work (teaching, scholarship, and leadership) focusing on the importance of language, in this case the specific meaning of words used to describe a concept is less of a priority. We could stick to ‘educational gain’, revert to ‘learning gain’, mention ‘value added’, or think in terms of ‘student futures’, but all of these phrases are meaningless if we are not clear about why we should bother thinking about this and acting on it.
What (should) underpin educational gain are the ideological, philosophical, sociological, psychological, and educational questions around the value of a university education. In basic terms – why should a student bother coming to university and why should we bother thinking about the best way of working with them while they’re here?
Let’s act – here's how
We return to the sticking point for the TEF evaluation. There is no simple answer, no one way of describing what students gain from a university education. The variables involved make single method of data collection unreliable when taken in isolation.
All of this does not mean that the endeavour itself is unimportant. Messiness and complexity are where interesting work takes place. Finding and explaining differences within and across disciplines helps us to be clear about what we do and do not value, and what values we emphasise in our teaching. It helps us to understand what our ‘signature pedagogy’ (Shulman, 2005) and our ‘pedagogic content knowledge’ (Shulman, 2015) are. It defines the underpinnings of our educational practices and helps us to be clear about the impact that any changes (or resistance to change) might have both on our students’ lives and on our own.
And that is why we should bother. We should bother because we care about the basic value of a university education. We care about the value of learning about our discipline. We care that our students leave us with the values and knowledge we care about. And we understand that if we are not able to express and evidence these values for ourselves, in our own way, then external forces may ask us to do it in a way that does not align with our own values.
A call to action
If you are interested in exploring what educational gain might look like and how you might evaluate, measure, evidence the impact of your education practices, then:
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Look out for our soon-to-be-published living reading list, which includes key texts relating to educational gain
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Tell us about any work you are doing in this area – we can add publications to the reading list, or we might invite you to take part in a podcast or write a blog about your work
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Invite us to arrange a workshop with your disciplinary scholarship centre to facilitate ways of exploring the questions posed here within your subject area
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Email us ([email protected], [email protected]) and arrange to meet to discuss how to develop your ideas into a pedagogical research project within the LITE community
- Learn more about the LITE Strategic Lead for Student Futures and Educational Gain (internal link, accessible by University of Leeds colleagues only)
References
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Office for Students. (2023). Approaches to identifying and measuring educational gains in TEF 2023. Office for Students.
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Shulman, L. S. (2015). PCK: Its genesis and exodus. In Re-examining pedagogical content knowledge in science education (pp. 13-23). Routledge.
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Shulman, L. S. (2005). Signature pedagogies in the professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52-59.
Authors
Agne Kocnevaite
Higher Education Research and Support Officer