Engaging less academically qualified Higher Education students being taught within a Further Education setting, who have weaker study skills and little experience of independent learning, is challenging. Confidence and motivation levels are often low and they feel overwhelmed. Effective assessment design is crucial and needs to capitalise on…

Students on a first year undergraduate economics module were given the choice of when to sit their first assessment in the subject in order to determine both preferences over assessment timing, and the impact of timing on performance. Clear preferences of having this option were shown (only 2% of students stated to be indifferent) with those more…

A Paris based MBA program has been set up as a for profit joint venture between a French entrepreneur and a U.S. University to be the first American style global MBA program delivered in English by primarily US faculty in Paris. Three directors headed the Paris Program in the first three years of operations while the U.S. University was led by…

It is generally accepted that engineering requires a strong aptitude for mathematics and science; therefore, students' judgments regarding their competence in these areas as well as engineering likely influence their confidence in engineering. Little is known about how self-confidence in science, mathematics, and engineering courses (STEM…

The emerging female advantage in education has received considerable attention in the popular media and recent research. We examine a persistent exception to this trend: women's underrepresentation in America's most competitive colleges and universities. Using nationally generalizable data spanning four decades, we evaluate evidence for…

Using cross-classified multilevel modeling, this study attempted to improve our understanding of the group-level conditional effects of student-faculty interaction by examining the function of academic majors in explaining the effects of student-faculty interaction on students' academic self-concept. The study utilized data on 11,202…

University administrators may invest significant time and resources with the goal of improving their "U.S. News & World Report" ranking, but the real impact of these investments is not well known since, as other universities make similar changes, rankings become a moving target. This research removes the mystique of the "U.S.…

This paper explores the role that state spending on higher education capital outlays plays in state budgets by considering the functional form of the relationship between state spending on higher education capital outlays and four types of state expenditures. Three possible functional forms are tested: a linear model, a quadratic model, and the…

To enhance student success, many colleges and universities have expanded academic support services and programmatic interventions. One popular measure that has been recognized as critical to student success is academic advising. Many institutions have expanded advising by creating centralized units staffed with professional advisors who serve…

Executive evaluation and compensation are central to organizational accountability and governance. Driven by increasing public demand on justifications and accountability for substantial salary increases for public university presidents, this paper is intended to shed light on the linkage between performance and executive compensation in public…

Many researchers assessing the efficacy of educational programs face challenges due to issues with non-randomization and the likelihood of dependence between nested subjects. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate a rigorous research methodology using a hierarchical propensity score matching method that can be utilized in contexts where…

This study employs the 2007-2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study and the National Research Center's survey data, "A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States," to investigate the (1) the effects of debt in relation to tuition and fees paid and (2) the effects of teaching assistantships,…

Recently a number of studies have focused on states' adoptions of postsecondary-specific policies. Cutting across much of this research is the presence and influence of interstate diffusion of policy adoptions, a phenomenon for which support is scant. This paper seeks to address this through broadening the categorization of policies beyond…

The idea that female faculty might serve as role models for female students has led to studies of the effect of female faculty on female student performance. Due to varying levels of aggregation of the measure of student exposure to female faculty--percentage of female faculty at an institution or department, percentage of classes taught by…

Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) has become increasingly popular in the higher education literature, but there is significant variability in the current approaches to the conducting and reporting of HLM. The field currently lacks a general consensus around important issues such as the number of levels of analysis that are important to include…