Teachers' content-related humor matters for the quality of higher education. However, little is known about the circumstances under which teachers use it. From a socio-cognitive perspective, teachers' achievement goals and self-efficacy appear to be relevant personal precursors. We investigated their effects on content-related humor in two…

The practice of combining digital and face-to-face elements into blended learning courses is becoming the new normal in higher education and offers a promising learning format. While studies on the effects of blended learning have so far focused mostly on the online components of the blends, the success of blended learning also rests on the…

Research on student engagement in higher education (HE) has addressed the conceptualisation, measurement and criticism of the phenomenon over the last two decades, predominantly in Western countries. The conceptualisation of student engagement has received little attention in countries of a lengthy association with the Soviet realm. This study…

This paper proposes a new application of Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) for estimating the student performance gap and how this can be used to assess changes of teaching quality at the individual unit-of-study level (module-level). Although there have been other examples in the literature that assess 'efficiency' in student outcomes, this is…

Since the twenty-first century, universities in many countries, including China, have introduced tenure-track employment to attract outstanding faculty. Through a survey of 1,099 faculty members from 21 high-level research universities in China, this study used a quasi-experimental method to examine the effect of the tenure track on faculty…

Given the challenging transition from secondary school into higher education, this quasi-experimental study measured the effects of a pre-academic programme (i.e. before starting at university) on student-faculty interactions, student-peer interactions, sense of belonging, and first-year academic performance. Fifty-eight first-year students…

Student dropout is a frequent phenomenon in higher education institutions that entails high costs for individuals, institutions, and society as a whole. Thus, it is crucial to identify protective factors regarding dropout in cases in which it could have been prevented. In line with Person-Environment Fit Theory, we assume that intrinsic motivation…

This paper contributes to research on teaching excellence by extending the current body of literature pertaining to mentoring pedagogies in undergraduate research settings across diverse social, institutional and disciplinary contexts. Our data comes from in-depth interviews with 32 international faculty who have received excellence awards for…

The article describes a test-blind admission initiative in a Chilean research university aimed at expanding the inclusion of talented, albeit educationally and socially disadvantaged, students. The outcomes of the test-blind admission cohort were compared with those of students admitted via the regular admission procedure to the same academic…

The dropout rate is an indicator of complex analysis and there is no consensus on its significance. Universities lack systematized, univocal methods for collecting student dropout data, making measurement problematic. In consequence, the formulas applied to analyze this phenomenon differ between countries and it is therefore an immense challenge…

A national cohort of doctoral students (n = 1390) completed a suite of metacognitive questionnaires indicating management of affective, intellectual and contingency demands in learning. Responses to the questionnaires were analysed for evidence of individual differences in reported metacognitive behaviours. Three patterns of metacognitive response…

Recruiting high-caliber individuals into education programs in higher education institutions to train them to be tomorrow's educators/teachers has been a perennial challenge. Students in education programs are found to be in general lower in academic standing than their counterparts in other fields, reflecting a seemingly distressing phenomenon of…

With increasing competition for postgraduate research scholarships, awarding processes demand attention and scrutiny. We examine inter-rater reliability for two prestigious New Zealand scholarships, the Shirtcliffe Fellowship and the Gordon Watson Scholarship. For each scholarship, five assessors (three academic; two non-academic) independently…

Based on self-reported cognitive, metacognitive, and behavioural strategy measures obtained from 828 final-year students from a university in Hong Kong, latent profile analysis (LPA) identified four distinct types of students with differential self-regulated learning strategy orientations: "competent self-regulated learners",…

This paper argues that a precondition for good studying and learning in undergraduate study is a reasonable student workload. Ways in which workload can be measured, in advance of presentation, are outlined. Suggestions on how to regulate student workload and some implications for curriculum and course design are presented. (GLR)