This study employs a quantitative method to understand the qualities of college experience that impact timely degree attainment. We specifically focus on how low socio-economic background students transition to and navigate the academic and social environment of a selective pubic research university. The study applies a longitudinal analysis to…

Within any higher education institution, there are great teachers who recognize the challenges to sustaining a commitment to highly effective teaching. The current paper explores the beliefs and practices of 10 faculty members who won an undergraduate teacher of the year award at a research-intensive institution. The paper explores the challenges…

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…

This article represents a cross-sectional study of undergraduate students across two north-west university business schools in the UK. A purposefully designed questionnaire was collected from 350 students. The student experience was described in the form of hand-written narratives by first and final year students and had been identified by the…

We study whether the completion of an optional professional year placement during undergraduate studies enhances job quality, in terms of earnings, job security and career fit, for economics graduates from a UK university. Using linear and discrete choice models, we estimate the effect of doing a professional year placement on four graduate…

One of the most important components of effective teamwork is cohesiveness. However, few empirical studies on the antecedents and consequences of group cohesiveness exist. In response to this gap, the current study draws on the Input-Process-Output model of team effectiveness to investigate the impact of individual and task factors on team…

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…

The focus of the research was students' perceptions of whether joint honours degrees represented a sound student learning experience and led to good academic and employability outcomes. In this minority mode of study for the United Kingdom, students study two academic subjects, rather than the more usual single subject. The qualitative methodology…

Service-learning (SL) is a form of experiential education which promotes student learning through community service and critical reflection. This study aims to examine the effect of SL on Chinese college students' transfer of learning and to explore the psychological mechanism of such effect. In Phase 1 with 186 Chinese college students, the SL…

University league tables give the image that there is a single dimension along which institutions can be placed. Most derive rankings from an aggregate score of multiple items, which often include opinion responses which has the potential to introduce sampling bias. This paper explores what happens when the two issues of dimensionality and…

First-degree course grades for a cohort of social science students are matched to their instructors, and are statistically decomposed into departmental, course, instructor, and student components. Student ability is measured alternatively by university acceptance scores, or by fixed effects estimated using panel data methods. After controlling for…

Undergraduate students are likely to have a range of reasons for attending university and expectations about their education. The current study aimed to determine the most prevalent reasons and expectations among students, and how these differed based on their personal circumstances. First-year undergraduate psychology students completed a…

Faculty-mentored summer undergraduate research experiences (SUREs) have been shown to increase the diversity of students pursuing research careers. No existing studies have approached the issue of broadening participation in STEM research training by focusing on mentoring relationship heterogeneity (MRH) in the context of SUREs. Increasing MRH…

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 representation of scientific knowledge and information on Wikipedia is controversial. While some entries present established scientific fact, other entries are devoid of information or present information of questionable rigour. Taking this and the problems associated with essay topics as assessment tasks into consideration, an assessment task…