There are no universal, precise, or explicit criteria for completing a doctoral degree successfully. Researchers and practitioners have pointed out how difficult and time consuming the supervision of graduate student research can be. When students in doctoral programs complete their degrees via distance delivery, supervision of graduate students…

Existing tensions within and between the discourses permeating doctoral candidature are being exacerbated by those of interdisciplinarity and industry collaboration. Drawing on the author's experience as a doctoral candidate within a cooperative research centre, this article interrogates the conflicting and challenging pressures placed on…

This article draws on the multi-theoretical approach to governance and a qualitative research method to examine the extent to which the corporate approach is practised in Australian public universities. The findings reveal that in meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders, universities are faced with a number of structural, legalistic, and…

The experience of academic practice is significantly fragmentary. This is a problem for, amongst others, early career academics trying to step up into what they might expect to be a unitary and coherent role and for academic developers. There have been recent historical developments which have highlighted this. However, I propose that the ground…

Research has reported equivocal results regarding the relationship between study time investment and academic performance in higher education. In the setting of the active, assignment-based teaching approach at Hasselt University (Belgium), the present study aimed (a) to further clarify the role of study time in academic performance, while taking…

The article focuses on the effects of management-by-results from the perspective of the work motivation of university employees. The study is based on extensive survey data among employees at Finnish universities. According to the results, performance measurement is based on quantitative rather than qualitative measures, and the current…

An important element of doctoral studies is identification with the academic community. Such identification is often complicated by part-time student status. In this paper, two part-time doctoral students and their supervisor employ Lave and Wenger's concept of legitimate peripheral participation to explore, through a critical socio-cultural…

This paper critically engages with the pedagogical design of a generic professional doctorate programme as a framework for creation of actionable knowledge within the practice of both adviser and candidate. Within this exploration the relational dimensions of the adviser-candidate interaction are identified and their potential impact partially…

Teaching approaches in higher education have already been the subject of a considerable body of research. An important contribution was Prosser and Trigwell's development of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI). The present study aims to map out the approaches to teaching profiles of teachers in higher education on the basis of their…

Previous studies have shown that in the higher education sector, information and communication technology (ICT) provides the impetus for change from the traditional concepts of teaching and learning, as well as prime motivation behind the change in scholarly and professional activities. This underscores the importance of ICT in higher education in…

Students, if organised into representative student governments or movements, can be a highly influential agency shaping higher education policy. This article introduces the Special Issue on student power in a global perspective, which addresses the question of how students are organised in different world regions and what role they play in higher…

The "Green Classroom" in the Botanical Garden of the University of Ulm is a learning forum outdoor school that is used by about 2500 school students annually. Its educational concept is based on experiential learning and is geared towards expanding students' biological knowledge and developing positive attitudes towards small…

Teachers' conceptions of teaching, including assessment practices, are substantial in directing student learning. Our article refers to assessment at tertiary level biological education. We studied life science (more specifically microbiology-related) teachers' assessment discourse describing how they understood assessment as part of…

Informed understandings of nature of science and scientific inquiry are generally accepted goals of biology education. This article points out central features of scientific inquiry with relation to biology and the nature of science in general terms and focuses on the relationship of students' inquiry skills in biology and their beliefs on…

The concept of natural selection serves as a foundation for understanding diverse biological concepts and has broad applicability to other domains. However, we know little about students' abilities to transfer (i.e. apply to a new context or use generatively) this concept and the relation between students' conceptual understanding and…