This paper examines experiences with "skills development" in South Africa to contribute to broader debates about "skills" and the relationships between vocational education and development. Numerous policy interventions and the creation of new institutions and systems for skills development in South Africa are widely seen as…

Background: Having an objective means of evaluating the quality of behaviour support plans (BSPs) could assist service providers and statutory authorities to monitor and improve the quality of support provided to people with intellectual disability (ID) who exhibit challenging behaviour. The Behaviour Support Plan Quality Evaluation Guide II…

As the education reform movement increasingly focuses on teachers and teaching, educators, policy-makers, and researchers need valid and reliable measures that can be used to evaluate individual teachers, provide guidance for improving teaching performance, and support research in ways that advance instruction and classroom dialog and practice. A…

Registration or recognition systems for best-practice health promotion interventions may contribute to better quality assurance and control in health promotion practice. In the Netherlands, such a system has been developed and is being implemented aiming to provide policy makers and professionals with more information on the quality and…

The importance of quality education in nation building cannot be over emphasized. There have been several calls on the educational managers on how to make the educational system to be more vibrant in the quality of its products after several quantity of mass failure and half baked products from our various educational institutions in the country.…

The article raises a problematic issue regarding an insufficient base of the conception of learning outcomes in the Bloom's taxonomy affective domain. The search for solutions introduces the conception of teaching and learning in the affective domain as well as presents validity criteria of learning outcomes in the affective domain. The…

What have we learned from 25 years of experience with external academic quality assurance that can help design more effective framework conditions for assuring academic standards? The key elements appear to be the structure and means of evaluating national academic quality assurance agencies, the nature of academic quality information mandated by…

This contribution looks critically at the achievements regarding the Bologna action line "European cooperation in quality assurance". Much has been realised but most of the visible achievements are at the supranational level: the development of the European Standards and Guidelines, the launch of the European Network of Quality Assurance…

In this paper we present a brief description of the evolution of quality assurance in Europe, paying particular attention to its relationship to the rising loss of trust in higher education institutions. We finalise by analysing the role of the European Commission in the setting up of new quality assurance mechanisms that tend to promote…

During the 15 years that "Quality in Higher Education" has held a focal position in the field of higher education assessment, the concept of quality has evolved from a debatable and controversial concept to an everyday matter in higher education. The author takes a personal look into the development of the field by first tracking the discursive…

"System accreditation" is a new approach developed for German universities to conduct the mandatory accreditation of all their study programmes. A pilot project at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz is playing an important role in paving the way for this alternative to prevailing programme accreditation. This article describes how…

The output of binary cuing systems, such as alerts or alarms, depends on the threshold setting--a parameter that is often user-adjustable. However, it is unknown if users are able to adequately adjust thresholds and what information may help them to do so. Two experiments tested threshold settings for a binary classification task based on binary…

In fiscal year 2009, the Department of Defense's (DOD) Military Tuition Assistance (TA) Program provided $517 million in tuition assistance to approximately 377,000 service members. US Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to report on (1) DOD's oversight of schools receiving TA funds, and (2) the extent to which DOD coordinates with…

A new study, sponsored by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, presented a comprehensive new perspective on the globalization of management education, (AACSB International, 2011). Its findings are sobering: with regard to emerging global trends in higher education and cross-border business, the report reveals a sizable gap…

Collaboration is essential to manage complex real world problems. We used phenomenologic methods to elaborate a description of collaboration between two departments at an academic medical center who considered their relationship to represent a model of effective collaboration. Key collaborative structures included a shared vision and commitment by…