From Insight to Action: Why Impact Evaluation Matters in Higher Education

Imagine wearing a smartwatch that promises to help you become more active. It vibrates gently every hour to remind you to stand up, tracks your movement, celebrates milestones, and shows encouraging messages about why physical activity matters for your health. You understand the advice perfectly and yet, a month later, your daily step count hasn’t changed. You know what to do, but you still don’t do it.

In education, this is a familiar story. We invest in programmes, tools, and innovations that should help learners acquire new skills or teachers adopt new methods. But knowing what to do isn’t the same as doing it. If we truly want change, whether in teaching practice, digital transformation, or student engagement, we need to understand what actually sticks. That’s where impact evaluation comes in.

From data to dialogue

“Know thy impact,” says John Hattie, urging educators to look beyond intentions and intuition. Often people say, “I’ve done this for years; I know it works.” But without evidence, we don’t really know why it works or for whom it doesn’t.

Impact evaluation moves beyond satisfaction surveys and immediate feedback. It asks the harder questions:

• Did the intervention lead to meaningful and sustainable change?
• How did participants apply what they learned in practice?
• What helped (or hindered) them in doing so?

At Risbo, a research and consultancy institute at Erasmus University Rotterdam, we approach these questions through a structured yet flexible method of impact evaluation. Our goal is simple: to make educational innovation both evidence-informed and actionable. In our framework we see evaluation not as the end of a project, but as part of its design process. The 5-step collaborative process combines academic rigour with real-world engagement. Researchers, educators, and policy officers work side by side to understand not just whether something worked, but what it means in context. Most importantly, impact evaluation does not end with delivering the end report – that is where a new process starts. A process of conversation with stakeholders, which results in new perspectives, fresh questions and actionable steps. Impact evaluation reminds us that data should inform, not dictate. It’s not about proving success but about understanding it.

From insight to action

This year’s OEB theme, Humanity in the Intelligent Age: Empathy, Responsibility, and the Duty of Care, aligns closely with our work. Evaluating impact is, at its core, an act of

care. It’s about taking responsibility for understanding whether our educational innovations genuinely support learners, teachers, and institutions in meaningful ways.

Our OEB 2025 workshop lets participants experience this process hands-on – designing impact evaluations that are rigorous, realistic, and relevant to their own context.

They’ll leave not just with a plan, but with a mindset: seeing evaluation as a tool for learning and growth, not control. Because ultimately, “knowing thy impact” isn’t about data: it’s about doing justice to the care and creativity behind education.

Written for OEB 2025 by Romy van Leeuwen and Esther Schut


Join Esther and Romy for their How to session “From Insight to Action: Embedding Impact Evaluation in Technical Innovation in Education” at OEB25.