Higher education had a predominant national and institutional focus for a long time. In Europe, supra-national political activities played a major role for increasing the interest in comparative research. Comparative perspectives are important in order to deconstruct the often national perspective of causal reasoning, for proving benchmarks, for…

It is widely acknowledged that the curriculum and knowledge in higher education (HE) are especially visible through (and often constructed by) assessment practices. If this is the case, it matters greatly what perspectives and theoretical tools are brought to bear on the task of understanding these practices. Having briefly set out three…

With the relentless internationalization and marketization of higher education in the past decades, English has been increasingly adopted as a medium of instruction at universities across the world. Recent research, however, has shown that despite its various optimistically envisioned goals, English-medium instruction (EMI) is not without problems…

This article explores the issue of what academic literacies research can bring to the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education from a theoretical perspective and by means of illustrations from a work in progress academic literacies research project in the natural sciences. It argues that reading and writing are central to the process…

The problem which this paper addresses is the difficulty of knowing students in large diverse classes in pedagogically useful ways. The paper discusses how the phenomenographic methodology can be employed to address this problem. It describes how phenomenographic studies and their results can enable teachers to "know their students" at a…

An investigation was undertaken into how a process involving peer review and observation of teaching can be used to enhance academics' teaching practices and inform professional development activities at an organization level. We describe an innovative and highly structured approach to gathering evidence of pedagogic practice from academic…

This paper considers how online, distance students enact the space of "the university", in the context of the rise of distance education within a traditional, "elite" institution. Aiming to provide insight into how students translate into distance the space of a university which has traditionally had its basis in conventional…

This paper addresses the problem of curriculum design in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and more specifically the challenge of designing foundation courses for first-generation or "disadvantaged" learners. Located in the social realist school of the sociology of education studies that builds on the legacy of Basil Bernstein, we…

Despite the value of the comparative perspective for the study of higher education is widely recognised, there is little consensus about the specific methodological approaches. Quantitative tools outlined their relevance for addressing comparative analyses since they are supposed to reducing the complexity, finding out and graduating similarities…

There is now an extensive literature about internationalisation in higher education. However, much of the research relates to North America and Europe. This paper is concerned with internationalisation in Latin America and seeks to consider perceptions and experiences in Colombia and Mexico, and to compare practice in the public and private…

The article examines academic leaders' conceptions of research profiling. Global science policies, including the Finnish governmental policy, promote the identification of areas of research excellence and recommend resource concentration on them. However, as active agents, leaders may have competing, even conflicting views on the pros and…

The introduction of the new tuition fee regime in the UK has resulted in growing concerns about the impact on students' expectations of their university experiences (e.g. Jones in "Perspectives" 14(2):44-48, 2010). This is coupled with reports from those such as the OIA (Office of the Independent Adjudicator (2012) Annual Report.…

Socialization has become a common framework through which to understand the doctoral student experience; however, the framework has predominately been used as a lens through which to understand traditional, single-discipline doctoral student experiences. Interdisciplinary doctoral programs are becoming increasingly common in both the United States…

Research into the relationship between research and teaching in higher education has flourished over several decades, and the most recent research phase has focused particularly on how the research-teaching nexus can enhance the quality and outcomes of the learning experience for both students and academics. On the basis of bibliographic review,…

This paper uses Tight ("High Educ Res Dev" 23(4):395-411, 2004; "High Educ Res Dev" 31(5):723-740, 2012; "High Educ Res Dev" 32(1):136-151, 2013)'s journal analysis and review framework to review a sample of 497 journal articles on researches concerning international students over the past 30 years. It was found…