Clearinghouses set standards of scientific quality to vet existing research to determine how "evidence-based" an intervention is. This paper examines 12 educational clearinghouses to describe their effectiveness criteria, to estimate how consistently[underlined] they rate the same program, and to probe why their judgments differ. All the…

Validity refers to the extent to which a given study reflects the dominant values of a research community regarding what constitutes "good" research. Methodological texts on qualitative research provide a wide range of criteria and strategies to help qualitative researchers validate their studies. Given the importance of these strategies…

This study investigates the application of the fuzzy logic method for scoring open-ended items, specifically comparing its effectiveness against traditional scoring methods. Utilizing the fuzzy TOPSIS method within the mathematics domain, this research established seven criteria for evaluating open-ended responses, developed in consultation with…

The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the…

How do we make judgements about the quality of online courses? Checklists and rubrics are commonplace in higher education for establishing and measuring design features of online courses. They are created and used by institutions, academics and educational designers to standardise measures for quality online course design. Despite an intensifying…

Debate about the defining features of 'doctorateness' or what examiners look for in a PhD thesis is on-going, but hardly any attention has been paid in related literature to Postgraduate Researchers' (PGRs) perceptions of the key attributes that make a PhD thesis excellent. In this study we examine the state of play of the former to then go on to…

In this paper, we present an approach for online course evaluation based on learners' behaviors during the learning process, where the course creator can monitor the quality status of their online courses based on learners' learning outcomes and then intervene to improve the success rate. For this purpose, a set of criteria has been developed.…

Concerns with educational quality have led to the implementation of external school evaluation (ESE), based on the premise that these processes can provide valuable information about schools and, consequently, create conditions for improvement. Improvement is based on the feedback, commonly in the form of an evaluation report, resulting from…

We describe the development and implementation of a holistic annual review process for nontenure-line faculty in the management department at a large, research university. We also discuss the department's evolution from solely utilizing Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) to a broader array of review criteria, developed by the department's…

Balancing coverage of qualitative, quantitative and combined methods, "Educational Research" offers a truly inclusive and integrated overview of the processes involved in planning, conducting and evaluating research. It first examines the general steps in the research process and then details the procedures for conducting specific types…

For over 30 years, the notion of authentic assessment in higher education has been adopted in academic practice, but it has managed to escape substantial critique. Although there have been multiple definitions and operationalisations of authentic assessment, current practice tends to foreground mimicking of work tasks. Authenticity cannot be…

'Transparency' is frequently invoked when describing assessment criteria in higher education. However, there are limitations to the metaphor: 'transparent' representations give the illusion that everything can (and should) be explicated, and that students are 'seeing through' to the educators' expectations. Drawing from sociomaterial perspectives…

This white paper discusses a model of best practices to better identify and address plagiarism issues with students using AI. It serves as an example to help younger institutions that may not have a policy in place to recognize the importance of hitting this head-on. By creating a taskforce, we were able to quickly come to a resolution for a…

Addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has become of paramount importance for higher education institutions; however, a lack of a transparent, transferrable approach to identifying and quantifying the extent of SDG contributions hinders the ability to benchmark against past performance or other institutions. In this study, a…

AI tutors are promised to expand access to personalized learning, improving student achievement and addressing disparities in resources available to students across socioeconomic contexts. The rapid development and introduction of AI tutors raises fundamental questions of epistemic trust in education. What criteria should guide students' critical…