Examines interconnections between accountability, power, and control within the British education system, focusing on the 5-18 education. Although some of the structures and processes are very similar to those of the U.S. K-12 system, the British national system is highly centralized and highly market-driven, with a strong emphasis on parental…

The main argument in Loyiso Jita's article is that although both law and convention have established stakeholder participation in higher education quality assurance, it lacks conceptual clarity. The article bravely attempts to develop a theory of "stakeholder identification and salience" by drawing mainly on business and organisational…

This article is a critical overview of the symposium on the contribution of the quality assurance process to democracy recently held at the University of Stellenbosch. It argues that recent symposia and colloquia in which South Africans themselves have attempted to stake out their intellectual credentials are extremely important and that the…

Purpose: This paper seeks to model and compute productivity, including a measure of quality, of a service which does not have marketable outputs--namely public education at the micro level. This application is a case study for Sweden public schools. Design/methodology/approach: A Malmquist productivity index is employed which allows for multiple…

Purpose: The paper aims to investigate the role of educational development centres, and their potential for playing a broader and more central role in quality and organisational development. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on the results of three external evaluations of educational development centres in Denmark and Norway,…

Purpose: Because of the ever-expanding commercialization and marketing of higher education, a need now exists to apply the concepts of business process improvement to colleges and universities. Aims to explore this issue. Design/methodology/approach: An open-ended qualitative questionnaire was developed, administered to 18 public and private…

Objective: The authors describe the complexity of social processes for implementing technological change. Once a new technology is available, information about its availability and benefits must be made available to the community of users, with opportunities to try the innovations and find them worthwhile, despite organizational resistances.…

Two matters of deep concern in the Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson article are the focus of this commentary. First, the authors agree that legislative mandates reifying particular methodological approaches would be ill informed and misdirected. Rather, what is legislatively appropriate is a mandate for rigorous peer review of federally funded work…

The Indian higher education system is one of the largest of its kind in the world. In spite of several built-in quality controls, such as the University Grants Commission's guidelines and the affiliating functions of the university, a deterioration in the quality of higher education was a serious concern for all stakeholders. In 1994 India…

The major goal of this article is to provide teachers with a set of clear and concise recommendations as well as a model for developing effective instruments that will promote powerful learning opportunities for their students, and at the same time, improve their own teaching skills. Based on the author's experience, some of the most problematic…

Cross-border higher education raises a number of challenges and there is a growing awareness among quality assurance agencies that they have to work together to address these challenges. The joint effort of UNESCO-OECD to develop "Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education" is an educational response to this need. This paper…

An examination of national and regional developments relating to quality assurance and accreditation systems in the three main countries having a campus of the University of the West Indies, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, provides an appreciation of some of the emerging provisions in the region to respond to the concerns of the…

In this paper the grades awarded in the subject level review process that ran in England between 1995 and 2001 are examined. These grades have subsequently been used to sustain most published league tables and are often cited in debates about institutional quality. However, the grades were never subject to any moderation, either at the time of the…

Objective: To predict psychiatric hospital length of stay (LOS) for a sample of Illinois Department of Children and Family Services wards across 4 fiscal years. Method: A prospective design was implemented using the Children's Severity of Psychiatric Illness scale, a reliable and valid measure of psychiatric severity, risk factors, youth…

Program reviews became widely used as quality assurance activities in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Since then, they have evolved as an essential component in demonstrating institutional effectiveness to accrediting bodies. The paper discusses various approaches to reviews with a focus on a recently reengineered institutional program…