Governing processes in Europe and within Europeanization are often opaque and appearances can deceive. The normative practices of improvement in education, and the connected growth in performance measurement, have been largely understood in their own terms. However, the management of flows of information through quality assurance can be examined…

By centralizing the issue of test fairness in language proficiency assessments, this study responds to a call by researchers for developing greater social responsibility in the language testing agenda. As inquiries into language attitude and psychology indicate, there is an underlying uncertainty pertaining to the validity of test use and score…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

The National Protocols for Higher Education Approval Processes (the "National Protocols") are a key element of the national quality assurance framework for Australian higher education. They protect the standing of Australian higher education nationally and internationally by assuring students and the community that higher education…

By 2010 the UK government intends to widen access and provide experience of higher education to half of those aged up to 30. Unlike many institutions, University of Paisley (UP) has exceeded its individual target on access. It has done this by providing entry routes for students with "non-traditional" qualifications. It is feared that…

In this article, the author discusses the issue surrounding the blanket rejection of career-school credits by traditional schools. Whether they attend a career college, community college, online college, or brick-and-mortar university, many Americans find that higher education has become a "grab and go" proposition. To them, attending multiple…

As usual, "U.S. News & World Report's" annual college rankings offered a heavy dose of deja vu when they arrived last August. In this article, the author discusses the response rate to the magazine's controversial reputational survey. The overall response rate plunged to its lowest level ever, a possible sign that organized criticism of the…

Decisions about admissions to medical school are based on assessments of the applicants' cognitive achievements and non-cognitive traits. Admission criteria are expected to be fair, transparent, evidence-based and legally defensible. However, unlike cognitive criteria, which are highly reliable and moderately valid, the reliability and validity of…

This study considers whether formally segmenting 4-year institutions by admissions selectivity affects the admission of transfer students. It develops a new measure, the student admission ratio, to compare the admission of transfer students in formally and highly segmented systems, informally and less segmented systems, and in formally unified…

In visual search tasks, observers look for targets in displays containing distractors. Likelihood that targets will be missed varies with target prevalence, the frequency with which targets are presented across trials. Miss error rates are much higher at low target prevalence (1%-2%) than at high prevalence (50%). Unfortunately, low prevalence is…

Since the explosion in multimedia computing, educators have been trying to work their way towards integrated human-computer interaction. Consequently, a large number of multimedia tools have been created, always following the trend of simpler and easier multimedia development. After outlining the transition from hardcore programming to modern…

Among the most knotty problems faced by investigators committed to interpretive practices in disciplines and fields such as sociocultural anthropology, jurisprudence, literary criticism, historiography, feminist studies, public administration, policy analysis, planning, educational research, and evaluation are deciding whether an interpretation is…

Throughout the United States, legislators, business leaders, educators, and other stakeholders are debating the impending crisis of the shortage of mathematicians and scientists in the United States. Several books, such as Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat" and Ted Fishman's "China, Inc.," accentuate this growing dilemma.…

"Voice" is widely considered to be a feature of effective writing. It's no surprise, then, that voice criteria frequently appear on rubrics used to score student essays in large-scale writing assessments. However, composition theorists hold vastly different views regarding voice and how it should be applied in the evaluation of student writing, if…

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), a unit within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), is responsible for advising the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of programs to improve the economic and social well-being of children and families. In collaboration…