Higher education (HE) systems around the world have experienced profound structural changes, particularly since the late 1960s to early 1970s, essentially driven by the need to expand access to tertiary education. This has resulted in a diversity of HE institutions (HEI) with different roles, missions and statuses, as well as academic staff with…

Studies of student re-enrolment patterns in higher education constitute, along with traditional studies of persistence and dropout, a key element for improving the quality of higher education institutions. However, these studies tend to be limited as they are centred on a single institution, due to the lack of national-scale data sets for…

There does not appear to be consensus on how to optimally match students during the peer feedback process: with same-ability peers (homogeneously) or different-ability peers (heterogeneously). In fact, there appears to be no empirical evidence that either homogeneous or heterogeneous student matching has any direct effect on writing performance.…

This quasi-experimental study examined the effects of a self-reflection intervention on college (college in this article refers to university-level education) students' positive thinking, learning motivation and self-regulation in Taiwan. One hundred and two college students were selected to participate in an 18-week intervention forming the…

Reading is an essential activity for learning at university, but lecturers are not always experienced in setting appropriate questions to test understanding of texts. In other words, their assessments may not be "constructively aligned" with the learning outcomes they hope their students to exhibit. In examination conditions, questions…

Undergraduate student attrition is a major concern in higher education. It is usually explained by the impact of student attributes; however, recent developments in student success literature point to the need of exploring institutional practices that may impact a student's decision to abandon their studies. The current weight of academic quality…

Higher education research is a multidisciplinary field, engaging researchers from across the academy who make use of a wide range of methodological approaches. This article examines the relation between discipline and methodology in higher education research, analysing a database of 567 articles published in 15 leading higher education journals…

Student populations in higher education in Australia and elsewhere in the developed world have experienced significant diversity over the past two decades. The existing literature has provided limited clarity about the effects of this diversity on the dimensions underpinning students' study philosophy domain. Based on a large data set from a…

Australian, Iranian and Portuguese university students ("n"?=?967) completed the University Students Depression Inventory (USDI) in English, Persian and Portuguese languages, respectively. A series of MANOVA analyses were used to examine differences in depression symptoms as an effect of the country and demographic variables.…

This paper presents findings from an empirical study of key aspects of the teaching and research priorities, beliefs and behaviours of 72 professorial and associate professorial academics in Science, Information Technology and Engineering across four faculties in three Australian universities. The academics ranked 16 research activities and 16…

While there has been systematic and on-going research into e-learning in universities for over two decades, there has been comparatively less evidence-based research into how key aspects of e-learning are internally constituted from a student perspective and how these aspects might be related to university students' learning experiences. The…

The main goals of course evaluations are to obtain student feedback regarding courses and teaching for improvement purposes and to provide a defined and practical process to ensure that actions are taken to improve courses and teaching. Of the items on course evaluation forms, the one that receives the most attention and consequently the most…

The goal of this study was to illustrate survival analysis with higher education data and gain insight into a limited set of factors that predict when students passed their first-year examination at a Dutch university. Study participants consisted of 565 first-year students in four departments. Data were collected on when students pass their…

One important line of inquiry in educational psychology involves the study of change of individuals' cognitive-motivational processes. The conjunctive use of longitudinal data with latent growth curve modeling procedures has, for example, allowed researchers to identify initial levels and to trace trajectories of theoretical variables such as…