As the number of articles on postsecondary topics expands, new methods are required to quantitatively understand the literature. Previous scholars looking at the higher education literature use manual coding, which limits the number of years that can be studied, or network analysis of citations and words, which does not yield groupings of articles…

In thinking about their experiences as community college advocates, Erin Doran and Kayla Lucht found that they both came to community colleges as adjuncts to supplement their incomes--but that a deep admiration and love for their students kept them there. Like so many others in higher education, they fell into their roles as community college…

Higher education, or more strictly higher education studies, is sometimes referred to as a discipline, though it is more often referred to as a field, sector or area for study. But what is a discipline and does higher education studies, at its current state of development, qualify as one? This article re-considers these matters and comes to some…

As the low-consensus field of higher education grows, it negotiates constraints and possibilities in the topics engaged and the scholars included. To trace the shifting patterns of research topics in higher education studies during the past 20 years, we examined networks of the topical structures of ASHE conference papers and a subset of U.S.…

In this article, taken from the 2019 ASHE Presidential address, Kristen A. Renn argues that to stay relevant and also to influence the direction of postsecondary education, there must be engagement in the will to reimagine the study of higher education. She discusses the challenges and opportunities for the future bound up in the fact that higher…

This article highlights several examples of student affairs practitioners and graduate preparation faculty engaging in the scholarship of practice. In doing so, these individuals merit a designation as scholars of practice because they are conducting research using their disciplinary knowledge and skill to address an institutional problem or…

Research agenda setting is a critical dimension in the creation of knowledge since it represents the starting point of a process that embeds individual researchers' (and the communities that they identify themselves with) interest for shedding light on topical unknowns, intrinsic and extrinsic factors underpinning that motivation, and the ambition…

This SoTL project explored sources of student anxiety and motivation across student assessment conditions of traditional numerical grading and pass/fail grading and sought to determine if pass/fail grading was helpful in lowering student anxiety while increasing student motivation to learn. Results indicated that students scored equally well on a…

The field of higher education studies has expanded dramatically in recent years. Notably, research centers/institutes and academic programs devoted to the field of higher education (tertiary education) has increased worldwide to now include peer-reviewed journals, books, reports and publications. Utilizing secondary data from 277 higher education…

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) remains a mostly elusive notion. For universities to genuinely contribute to SoTL, they must delineate clear parameters of engagement. For example, while some engage SoTL at the academic level, others examine it from an institutional policy perspective. Others view it from national and international…

The PhD is the highest formal qualification and signifies a scholar's rite of passage as a legitimate contributor of new knowledge in a field. Examiner reports make claims about what is legitimate in a thesis and what is not and thus articulate the organising principles through which participation in a field is measured. The authors analysed 39…

Published annually since 1985, the Handbook series provides a compendium of thorough and integrative literature reviews on a diverse array of topics of interest to the higher education scholarly and policy communities. Each chapter provides a comprehensive review of research findings on a selected topic, critiques the research literature in terms…

As part of recent complex transformations, it seems that higher educational organisations are being forced to reorganise, standardise and streamline in order to survive in the new political and economic context. How are ethnographers in general going to approach these contemporary phenomena? By drawing on the conceptual history of anthropology,…

Like everything else today, there is a changing pattern in education. Some obvious elements are education's social function, demographics, and technology. A fourth dimension is being added to function, audience, and technique, and that is research. Research is also being reorganized, and now it is becoming an issue in the colleges. When, for…

This study aims to explore the development of higher education research in South Korea based on historical and scientometric perspectives. After the evolution of the country's higher education research community is presented, articles focusing on higher education from 1995 to 2012 are analysed. In total, 145 articles in international journals and…