Portuguese higher education is changing, with a significant impact on academic careers, reinforcing the academic "estate." The focus of this paper is the analysis not only of the gender differences per se, but it also relates them to other variables such as the higher education subsystem, career positioning, the sociocultural background…

It has been suggested that problem-based learning (PBL) has a positive impact on the team-working skills of medical, health and social care students. These skills are important for graduates to master to enable effective collaborative working in today's diverse health and social care settings. What is not clear from the literature is how…

Higher education in further education colleges has a long history and has expanded in recent years. However, higher education in further education colleges is often treated as being unproblematic. This paper rejects the argument that higher education is simply a level of study, noting that it is a contested concept. As such, the paper seeks to…

In this paper we describe findings from a research project in the South West of England that enquired into the impact of the changing requirements of programmes leading to teaching qualifications in the FE sector. We utilise the metaphor of "learning journey" as a heuristic to discuss the professional formation of student teachers in…

There is evidence that ethnic minority learners in further education in England either under-achieve or are under-represented because they face various inhibitors connected to their ethnicity. Motivators may be in place, however, which increase attainment specifically for some ethnic groups. This exploratory study intends to examine what works and…

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific "subject" environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking…

From the 1990s the professional preparation of intending teachers in Scotland moved from monotechnic colleges to seven university schools of education. "Universitisation" (Menter et al. 2006) created new opportunities for the creative adaptation of work cultures to value teaching and research. New appointments are expected to demonstrate…

This paper presents a detailed quantitative analysis of the use of seen questions within examinations in Economics option modules at one UK university. 4622 marks for seen and unseen questions awarded over a period of three years were analysed; the impact of personal characteristics was analysed using a sub-sample. It was found that the number of…

The following paper proposes a discipline-affirming response to the challenge facing higher education in the context of the knowledge economy. It resists the drive to reduce the value of a humanities based education to the mere production of skills and instead affirms the substantial body of knowledge of specific disciplines. It uses as its model…

Student engagement is increasingly part of higher education rhetoric. It is seen as a means for universities to understand and enhance the student experience. This has been prompted by a number of potentially conflicting factors. These include growing consumerism in higher education, the rise of user involvement and the notion of students as…

In this study we investigate the conceptions of mathematics bridging courses held by students enrolled in these courses at a major Australian university. We report on the participants' responses to email-interview questions about the mathematics bridging courses to describe a two-dimensional outcome space of variations in awareness about the…

This paper demonstrates how women who study childcare achieve congruence in their lives. Rather than simply juggling the needs of family, work and study in order to escape the domestic sphere, they choose to minimise dissonance, finding that parenting children, working with children and studying children creates a stable framework with reciprocal…

This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study that investigated 25 international students' use of online information resources for study purposes at two Australian universities. Using an expanded critical incident approach, the study viewed international students through an information literacy lens, as information-using learners.…

This paper analyses two aspects of developing formative assessment processes within universities in Spain: the academic performance of the students and the workload that formative assessment creates for both academic staff and students. It presents the results of 10 research projects covering the first semester of the 2007-08 academic year, mainly…

This quantitative investigation examined the influence of low and high self-efficacy on candidate teacher academic performance in a foreign language teaching methodology course through testing the speculation that high self-efficacy levels would improve pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). Positivism guided the research design at the levels of…