Policymakers and institutional leaders in higher education too often make decisions based on descriptive data analyses or even anecdote when better analysis options could produce more nuanced and more valuable results. Employing the setting of higher education program evaluation at a midwestern regional public university, for this study we…

The Upward Bound Math and Science (UBMS) program at Temple University (TU) seeks to guide first-generation, low-income high school students from Philadelphia in their quest to obtain postsecondary STEM degrees that lead to related careers. This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of the program by analyzing its students' performance in light of…

There is a lively discussion on how to evaluate competence-based higher education in both evaluation and competence research. The instruments used are often limited to course evaluation or specific competences, taking a rather narrow perspective. Furthermore, the instruments often comprise predetermined competences that cannot be adapted to higher…

It is increasingly important that higher education institutions be able to audit and evaluate the scope and efficacy of their digital learning resources across various scales. To date there has been little effort to address this need for a validated, appropriate, and simple-to-execute method that will facilitate such an audit, whether it be at the…

The effectiveness of a peer-mentoring program was examined at a university in California. Previous studies suggest university peer mentoring might increase students' feelings of engagement, which can contribute to their retention. Pretest and posttest data were collected from 304 freshmen (mentored and nonmentored) during the fall of 2012 in a…

In Australia, a review of the higher education sector is usually triggered by a change in government leadership, followed by the development and implementation of the government's response in the form of a reform package to enact change. The aim of this study was to conduct an independent evaluation of a large-scale national government policy…

This article reports findings from a recent research project, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which explored the current landscape of professional doctorate (PD) provision in English higher education institutions (HEIs) (Mellors-Bourne et al., 2016). Given the absence of a clear definition by the Quality…

During the 2004 legislative session, the Colorado General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 189 (SB189), which established the first system of college vouchers in the United States. The supporters of SB189 hoped that the voucher system, called the College Opportunity Fund (COF), would: 1) stabilize the flow of state funding to higher education; 2)…

The Three article dissertation is a program review of the Counseling 50 college preparedness program at Fullerton College, Fullerton California. Article I is a comprehensive review of literature on educational legislation during the 1960s that led to the development of educational programs and opportunities for students from underrepresented…

Experts in the field have advocated for critical approaches to Spanish heritage language (HL) curricula in which learners' proficiency in the language varieties that they bring from their homes and communities is considered an asset and culturally valuable knowledge. The proposal described here focuses on the adoption of a programmatic…

This paper presents a quasi-experimental evaluation of a required, teaching-focused, new faculty program at a large research university. The study makes use of institutional data, including student evaluations of teaching and faculty participation in educational development activities, which are available on many campuses yet rarely used in…

DREAMzone is an educational intervention designed to increase higher education professionals' competency and self-efficacy for working with undocumented students. Grounded in social learning theory, we developed the DREAMer-ally instrument to investigate the effects of DREAMzone on DREAMer-ally competency and self-efficacy. Findings support the…

In response to pedagogical challenges in higher education, blended learning has become a prevalent practice in colleges and universities. Flipped learning (FL) represents a newly emerging form of blended learning, where students individually watch online lectures prior to class and then engage in classroom learning activities interacting with…

State support in higher education (HE) is often justified on the grounds that HE is important for the development of the country. However, little analysis is normally done in order to assess the impact of education quality initiatives. The Mexican government has been engaging in a policy of HE quality improvement that can be traced to 1989. In…

This paper develops a theoretical framework that could facilitate the application of the Autovalutazione, Valutazione periodica, Accreditamento (AVA) method in Italian universities, trying to simplify the use of this approach, and to cover the existing gap between Italy and others European academic institutions. The new competitive environment in…