Due to increasing demand for higher education around the world, concerns regarding the quality of education in higher education institutions have increased. The aim of this study was to determine perceptions of accreditation self-study coordinators and programme administrators on the influence of accreditation on academic quality. Data was…

Drawing on recent research involving approximately 6000 higher education staff, this paper examines the impact of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) on their professional lives since its launch in 2016. Our findings raise fundamental concerns, methodologically and conceptually, about the fitness for the purpose of the TEF…

Universities' reputations are built in part on graduates' assessments of the quality of education they received. What do these assessments tell us? Are graduates' judgments of quality based on their experiences as students or on their later job satisfaction, that is, on process or on outcomes? The objective of this study was to assess the extent…

Participation and integration of non-traditional students (NTS) in university education is influenced by factors within the institution and those external to the institution, including participants' self-perceptions and dispositions. The objective of this qualitative study is to draw from the life-world environment component of Donaldson and…

Research experience is widely used in quality assurance exercises to benchmark postgraduate education at the institutional level. However, individual differences in students' research experience have been largely neglected. Furthermore, little is known about how differences in students' research experience are associated with skill development and…

Although several studies have examined how quality teaching and learning is defined and operationalised in the global North, there is a paucity of such studies in developing country contexts. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, the research applies Sen's idea of deliberative democracy to a multi-stakeholder evaluation of policy formulation and…

Field placement has traditionally been an important component of professional and vocational education programmes, and there is a growing interest in workplace experience in higher education programmes in general. In this article, we examine the direct and the indirect links between classroom preparation for placement, placement quality and…

After reviewing varous methods to evaluate college student learning, it is proposed that U.S. faculty at neighboring colleges could collaborate to construct tests, much like the external examinations used in the United Kingdom, to assess student learning and the quality of education more consistently. In the long term, this method would also…

While the establishment of quality assurance has been seen for decades as the most significant instrument to secure and enhance the quality of teaching and learning in higher education, the concept of developing more specific learning outcomes has in recent years attracted much interest, not least due to the creation of national qualification…

The massification of higher education has dramatically changed the association between credentials and jobs in advanced countries, while its impacts in transitional economies have received less academic attention. To address this research lacuna, the paper utilizes rich information from China's national surveys of college graduates from 2003 to…

Secondary analysis of the UK's 2011/12 Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey reveals that many existing assumptions about graduate internships are questionable. This article proposes a reliable way of estimating the true extent of internships including those reported as 'voluntary' jobs: hidden internships. In doing so the article…

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…

Within higher education, the importance of learning outcomes has become well-established. They are expected to guide the teaching and learning process, assessment, and curriculum development, while at the same time act as foundational elements to transitions towards national qualifications frameworks, competency-based education, and international…

The value for money of UK undergraduate degree courses is under increasingly critical scrutiny. Understanding the level of learning achieved by students on any particular course has therefore become of paramount importance as an indicator of teaching quality. The change to the learning that a student undertaking a course has acquired can be…

Team project-based learning has become increasingly common in higher education. This study aimed to characterise and understand students' team learning experiences in team project-based learning by considering various aspects, such as individual qualities, teamwork, task, and instructor support. K-means clustering analysis was performed using…