A collaboration of 26 Dutch universities of applied sciences is working on the development and implementation of the first generation of professional doctoral programs. The distinctiveness of a professional doctoral program has been defined for seven professional domains, including health and well-being as an example. It is described as being an…

Increasing attention devoted to internationalisation and quality assurance of higher education reinforced the need to analyse their interdependent relationship, known as quality assurance of internationalisation and internationalisation of quality assurance in higher education. On this basis, the present article exposes the development and…

Concise, clear and comprehensive snapshots of vocational education and training systems in EU, Iceland and Norway: this is what the Cedefop Spotlight on VET series offers. Building on individual country Spotlights, this publication provides an overview of VET systems with their distinctive qualities, such as main accession and progression routes…

Among pioneering European countries who started to establish a formal higher education quality assurance system in the 1980s, the Netherlands adopted one based on peer review and quality enhancement, which was replaced in 2003 by an accountability-oriented accreditation system under the substantial influence of the Bologna Process. Recently, the…

This chapter summarises the rationales and impacts of the national reforms of the six countries selected (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Portugal) and complements it with a literature review on reforms in these and other EU countries. The reforms emerge as having been inspired by endogenous processes -- with or without a…

The development of rigorous and universally respected quality assurance procedures that monitor and recognize the delivery of effective and ethically responsible public services has become increasingly evident in many countries. However, within professional psychology, these developments generally are located in individual countries. With a few…

While measurement precision is relatively easy to establish for single tests and assessments, it is much more difficult to determine for decision making with multiple tests on different subjects. This latter is the situation in the system of final examinations for secondary education in the Netherlands and is used as an example in this paper. This…