With various internet resources available to students, the main aim of a good university education today should not merely be to provide students with content knowledge, but rather to equip them with essential skills necessary to develop into lifelong learners. Among science educators, repeated calls have been made to promote a more holistic…

Learning about teaching through inquiry is a sound practice for professional development and the university teacher-as-researcher is now commonplace. With the proliferation of inquiry-based postgraduate programmes in university teaching, more academics from across the disciplines are learning new ways of doing research. In this paper, I draw on 10…

The system currently deployed to assess research outputs in higher education can influence what, how and for whom academics write; for some it may determine whether or not they write at all. This article offers a framework for negotiating this performative context--the writing meeting. This framework uses the established theoretical underpinning…

This paper examines the current understanding of the development of graduate attributes in higher education. The current understanding is rooted in the system-based, behaviouristic approach that emphasises the identification of graduate attributes and curriculum mapping. This approach gives little consideration to more relational-holistic,…

Attempts to recruit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into nursing degrees have made minimal impact on the number of registered nurses working in Australia's healthcare sector. Yet increasing the number of Indigenous nurses remains one of the most important objectives in strategies to close the health gap between Indigenous and…

Plagiarism continues to be a concern within academic institutions. The current study utilised a randomised control trial of 137 new entry tertiary students to assess the efficacy of a scalable short training session on paraphrasing, patch writing and plagiarism. The results indicate that the training significantly enhanced students' overall…

The global growth in postgraduate (PG) study since the mid-1990s has been attributed to the expansion in Masters by Coursework participation (Bekhradnia, B. (2005). Postgraduate education in the UK: Trends and challenges higher education policy institute. Paper presented at a conference "The future of postgraduate education supporting the…

The objective of this study is to add to the extant literature on graduate attributes by examining the mediating role of global/moral citizenship and lifelong learning attributes in the relation between students' scholarship attributes and their academic self-directedness in a higher-education open distance learning (ODL) environment. The…

Women remain under-represented in almost all academic levels at universities internationally, and previous evidence has suggested that women move out of the university system in increasing numbers as they progress from postgraduate study to an academic career. The current study aimed to explore the role of gender in the reports of study…

Most new students experience school to university transition as challenging. Students from backgrounds with little or no experience of higher education are most vulnerable in this transition, and most at risk of academic failure. Emotion appears implicated in the differential way in which first-generation students and students with family…

This paper argues for the re-integration of academic development (AD) and a academic language and learning (ALL) practitioners in Australian higher education. This argument is made as universities aim to develop internationally recognised, inter-disciplinary and standards-based curricula against the backdrop of international comparative education…

Institutes of higher learning are tending to reduce the amount of face-to-face teaching that they offer, and particularly through the traditional pedagogical method of lecturing. There is ongoing debate about the educational value of lectures as a teaching approach, in terms of both whether they facilitate understanding of subject material and…

This study aimed to investigate the perceptions, interactions and behaviours of different-ability college students when they worked on different types of assessments. Two classes of 145 Vietnamese college students participated in this three-month study. The students were assigned to mixed-ability groups, each of which consisted of five students.…

Since the late-1990s, the University of South Australia has embedded seven Graduate Qualities across all programs. Subsequently, the higher education landscape has changed dramatically in terms of national policies and standards, as well as technologies available to support learning and teaching. Most higher education institutions now have their…

Although communication skills in English are important for both their career prospects and the success of their overall study experience, many international students find their spoken English a barrier to employment after graduation. In this paper, we draw on longitudinal interview data from international postgraduates to investigate the…