Student Engagement (SE) refers to the extent to which a student participates in academic and non-academic activities, invests in and commits to learning, belonging and identification with the educational institution. Despite the relevance of SE for students' success, a few valid and reliable instruments have been developed. This study presents the…

This paper presents an experience in which Lesson Studies (LS) are viewed as a lever for improving university teaching in Spain. The expansion of the LS model in the West is an indication of its value for improving teaching and provides us with different interpretations and variations of it. We will describe a process of Participatory Lesson Study…

Drawing upon a wider piece of research, this paper focuses on the validation of a 'use of assessment' scale in five Portuguese public universities with 5549 students. The study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the scale, to describe how students look at assessment uses, to analyse their utility perceptions of assessment, and to…

In the early years of the twenty-first century, the European Union faced an influx of refugees from war-torn areas of the world. By the end of 2015, nearly a million new refugees had arrived in Germany alone, half of them from Syria. Understanding how the Syrian refugee population has interacted with the German system of higher education is…

We provide an integrative review of research on gender and academic careers conducted in the Nordic countries from 2003-2018. We investigate the nature and content of contemporary Nordic research and critically examine the methodological and theoretical approaches authors have used. We read, categorised, and analysed 74 articles retrieved from Web…

The purpose of the study reported here was to observe the effects of examination practices on the extent to which university students procrastinate. These examination practices were: (1) limiting the number of resits, (2) compensatory rather than conjunctive decision-making about student progress, and (3) restricting the time available for…

Previous research has shown that female doctoral graduates earn less than male doctoral graduates; however, there has been little research on the determinants of this gender pay gap. This paper investigates the determinants of the gender pay gap among doctoral graduates in Germany. By relying on human capital theory, traditional gender roles and…

Constructive Alignment (CA) is neither the panacea, nor the unalloyed evil depicted in the majority of higher education discourses. But rather, the theory is a heuristic and accessible representation of commonly agreed upon aspects of modern curriculum and educational theory, designed explicitly to support learning and teaching. However, when…

The idea of twenty-first century skills has been popular in higher education, and education in general, for the last couple of decades. At the heart of this idea is the belief that those leaving education for the workplace now require a particular skill set in order to succeed and help deliver an improving economy and society in an increasingly…

This paper analyses the phenomena of co-existence of competing moral principles in a university merger. In doing so, the paper builds on Boltanski and Thévenot's theoretical framework of orders of worth to account for the ways in which different social actors, both inside and outside academia, actively engage in justification work to solve…

This contribution examines recent transformation in the institutionalization of a new mode of governance in the field of Higher Education. We identify three characteristics of the institutional design of public Quality Assurance Agencies (QAAs) that operate at the national level in the field of higher education. In order to do so, we examine three…

The concept of a 'displaced academic', which previously appeared in the analysis of the WWII-related forced migration from the Nazi-occupied Europe, has resurfaced in Ukraine's higher education after Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas in 2014. We re-examine the relevance and interpretations of this concept in embattled…

In this article, we examine how critical thinking and creativity of students, in addition to study results, are related to their chance of being selected for an excellence programme, and whether these student characteristics determine successful completion of their participation in an excellence programme. Between 2016 and 2019, over 1000 students…

Having found that excellence education in Dutch higher education institutions can function as a testing ground for educational innovations, we ask the questions: Are 'excellence education' teaching methods diffused towards courses in regular study programmes? Are organisational structures affected? And are there noticeable external effects? And…

Excellence ('honours') programmes are a relatively new way in Dutch higher education institutions to serve the needs of talented and ambitious students, but may also serve as a testing ground for educational innovations. Using the structural ambidexterity concept, this paper investigates if and how excellence education functions as explorative…