The "Guidelines of Good Practice" are specifically addressed to quality and assurance agencies. The purposes of the "Guidelines" is the following: (1) To promote professional development among external quality assurance agencies (EQAAs) and their staff; (2) To be used as part of the criteria in the self and external evaluation of EQAAs; (3) To use…

While scholars have been peripatetic since the creation of the very first universities, a phenomenon of more recent years is the mobility of education, where it is the educational provision rather than the scholar that crosses national borders. This is termed "transnational" or "cross-border" education. Attendant on this new…

Since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 states have experienced continual change in how they define and implement alternate assessments. A subset of 16 states was randomly selected to determine how each state is implementing alternate assessments and achievement standards for students with the most significant cognitive…

The National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting quality child care, believes that family child care accreditation is the true measure of high-quality family based care. In this article, the author presents the steps made by the NAFCC to accreditation. NAFCC Accreditation is a formal system…

This is a book about quality and how to control quality through deliberate actions on the part of the professionals developing and implementing the instances of instruction available at an organization. Quality control theory favors no particular learning philosophy and is only directed towards aspects of how, what, where and when measurements are…

Both academic and non-academic institutions, such as businesses, have increasingly been interested in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to support learning, otherwise termed e-learning. This interest has been fuelled by the new developments in ICT, such as multimedia and the Internet with its World Wide Web. Other…

Over the past few decades there has been a rise in the number of federally funded large scientific research initiatives, with increased calls to evaluate their processes and outcomes. This article describes efforts to evaluate such initiatives in one agency within the U.S. federal government. The authors introduce the Evaluation of Large…

In Spring 2006,. the NAEP Validity Studies (NVS) Panel was asked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to undertake a validity study to examine the quality of the NAEP Mathematics Assessments at grades 4 and 8. Specifically, NCES asked the NVS Panel to address five questions: (1) Does the NAEP framework offer reasonable content…

This report was prepared at the request of the Government of Malaysia (GOM) as a contribution to the long term development objectives for the university sector under the Ninth Malaysia Plan. The GOM is considering new policy directions to make the country a more competitive player in the world economy. Such a strategy will require bold innovations…

Facilities that self-police under the Environmental Protection Agency's Audit Policy are eligible for reduced penalties on disclosed violations. This paper investigates whether self-policing has additional consequences; in particular, whether self-policing reduces future enforcement activity. Using data on U.S. hazardous waste enforcement and…

Strategic planning and quality management have been developed independently of each other, but they meet in practice in many kinds of organisations. Strategic planning and quality assurance integrate different aspects of higher education institutions (HEIs) to ensure high-quality educational outcomes. This paper investigates the role of these two…

This paper begins by reviewing some of the different models of third-party observation of university teaching that can be found in the literature. Having analysed these, it argues that--if "peer" is taken to indicate equality of status--only one is genuinely a model of peer-observation. It proposes an alternative categorisation of third-party…

Quality Rating System (QRS) initiatives define levels of quality based on research and then support providers with funding and technical assistance to increase their quality. Each program is assessed and given a number of "stars" to indicate to parents what level of quality the program has reached. In this article, the author describes…

This study was carried out at the request of the Ministry of Education, Zambia. The Commonwealth of Learning contracted Turning Points Consultancy CC, a Namibian company, who provided the services of the author, to "carry out an evaluation of the Zambia College of Distance Education (ZACODE) and submit recommendations to the Ministry of…

The title of this document is a deliberate play on the title of the biennial reports on the progress of Bologna produced by the European Students' Union, "Bologna With Student Eyes." It is a way of paying tribute to student involvement in the Bologna reforms, and marking a parallel student working participation in the state system…