Understanding students' college enrollment decisions is critical because the admission outcome can affect the school's quality and its reputation. In this paper, we study how students consider their relative academic ability compared to their potential peers. Drawing from social comparison theory, we posit that there are asymmetric effects due to…

Classroom assessment is an effective way to collect evidence about student learning, and a teacher's professional responsibility in assessment is to use high quality, fair, and ethical assessment information to make decisions about students' learning and teachers' instruction. This study used a scenario-based survey and investigated college…

High dropout rates in STEM disciplines are certainly among the most crucial challenges that higher education is facing. While prior research has mainly applied an individual-centered approach that has helped identify factors explaining student dropout, an important yet under-examined issue is how those responsible for shaping the academic…

To this date, research on the interplay between organisational structure/managerial and organisational value/psychological elements which impact on educational quality is scarce and fragmented. As a consequence of a lack of knowledge in this area, institutions often address these elements in isolation, moving past integral approaches, which…

Whilst teaching awards have become an established practice in higher education, important questions remain about their effectiveness in recognizing high-quality teaching, with recent research suggesting that they may have dysfunctional consequences. We investigate how awards are perceived and impact upon recipients and non-recipients and propose…

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…

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…

Globalisation, technological changes and the industry-to-service economy transition has produced dramatic changes in the labour market, thus affecting higher education. It is no longer sufficient to provide students with disciplinary knowledge. Graduates are also expected to be adaptive, innovative and flexible. As these competencies are better…

This research developed a scale to assess the following life skills in higher education students: teamwork, goal setting, time management, emotional skills, interpersonal communication, social skills, leadership, and problem solving and decision making. Study 1 adapted an existing scale for the purposes of this research and provided evidence for…

Developing leadership in students is part of the remit of higher education institutions. In recent decades, student leadership development programs have proliferated at universities worldwide. However, the contested understanding of the term 'leadership' has resulted in lack of clarity regarding how this may be 'developed' in higher education.…

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…

Using a unique dataset built around published papers in top quality public policy, public administration and program evaluation journals, we find that 29.7% of respondent authors indicate that the knowledge from their articles was used by policymakers or public administrators. These data are used to test for different patterns of use for policy vs…

In recent years, online education has boomed. However, online business ethics education faces a challenge in which the lack of communication among teachers and students leads to a decline in teaching effectiveness. Social media applications can be imbedded in traditional ethics education to solve this problem. In this paper, based on the…

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…

While the stated aim of quality assessments is to improve the quality of the products and services offered by universities, some faculty view them as instrumental in justifying government budget cuts in education. By means of a survey administered to more than 300 faculty from 20 academic programmes undergoing quality assessments, we studied…