The topic of employability has been much discussed in higher education policy and research contexts in recent years, as higher education has been re-positioned as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. This article aims to review and synthesise the various arguments that have been made in favour of, or against, the adoption of…

Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes…

Expanded and increasingly diversified systems of higher education are generally differentiated vertically and/or horizontally. National quality management systems attempt to identify both kinds of differences in quality and standards across their higher education systems. But different quality management systems and processes can pose different…

This volume includes four sections of the 2023 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Business and Management; (2) Education and Educational Research; (3) Political Science; and (4) Sociology and Healthcare. Business and Management includes 6 papers covering business, including management and organizational studies, business law, and…

This paper explores the potential of incorporating constructs of distributive justice and procedural justice into summative assessment of student learning in higher education. I systematically compare the process used by managers to evaluate employee performance in organizations--performance appraisal (PA)--with processes used by professors to…

As enrollment of students in online courses has steadily increased over the last few decades, very little attention has been given to online instructor evaluation. This is an area of online education that needs additional research to better ascertain the current state of online instructor evaluation as well as discover ways to improve its…

Does assessment change what is being taught? Laurie Occhipinti uses an analogy to answer this question. While conducting research on economic development in a remote rural area of the Argentine Chaco, a community had received some public funds to construct a new community center. They discussed where to place the center. The middle of the village…

The ever-increasing internationalization of study programs and global mobility of students call for greater transparency of and valid information on the knowledge and skills students acquire over the course of their studies. Several theoretical and methodological challenges arise from the immense diversity of degree courses, study programs, and…

Higher education has made impressive progress concerning student learning outcomes assessment practices. Yet--despite the assumption that better assessment would lead to better student learning--few examples of demonstrable student learning improvement exist at the academic degree or university levels. In 2014 Fulcher, Good, Coleman, and Smith…

The question of how well students are doing is central to the enterprise of higher education. Students want to know what grade was received on the paper or test. Faculty want to know what it will take to reach tenure or be reappointed. Admissions staff want to know how many students need to be enrolled in order to provide tuition revenue required…

Global university rankings are often thought of as games, defined by roles and rules that universities must play in order to confirm their legitimacy and gain visibility as actors in the global academic market. While some countries are well represented at the top of rankings charts, others are just joining the race and testing out different…

The role and impact of diversity in higher education has permeated conversations about student access and achievement for many years. Language articulated by various courts suggests that higher education policies should reflect a broad conceptualisation of diversity beyond that of the magnitude and proportion of race and ethnicity, yet…

The author knew of no formalized system for appraising grant capacity and readiness so, in an effort to understand the current state of knowledge regarding assessment of these institutional factors, conducted a systematic review of the research administration literature. Every article published from 1982 through 2013 by five major journals in the…

Ten years after the first global rankings appeared, it is clear that they have had an extraordinary impact on higher education. While there are fundamental questions about whether rankings measure either quality or what's meaningful, they have succeeded in exposing higher education to international comparison. More so, because of the…

This article emphasizes the urgent demand for measurements of university internationalization and proposes a new approach to develop a set of internationally applicable indicators for measuring university internationalization performance. The article looks into existing instruments developed for assessing university internationalization,…