Discussion of the agenda for research and practice in graduate and professional education identifies and discusses five arenas for assessment; demand; admission criteria; program quality; persistence; and student learning outcomes. Specific questions to be addressed and additional considerations are noted for each arena. (MSE)

Research indicated that students often graduate from colleges and universities without encountering critical thinking skills in undergraduate coursework. The first national report raising concerns over the declining quality of education stemmed from the National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983), and findings based on disappointing test…

This report is a product of an European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) Workshop "Assessing educational quality: Knowledge production and the role of experts" hosted by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT) in Oslo in February, 2008. The workshop gathered representatives from higher…

Purpose: The paper describes the purpose of and strategies for conducting post-occupancy evaluations (POEs) as a method for assessing school building performance. Set within the larger context of global efforts to develop and apply common indicators of school building quality, the authors describe research conducted within the newest generation of…

Academic achievement indices including GPAs and MCAT scores are used to predict the spectrum of medical student academic performance types. However, use of these measures ignores two changes influencing medical school admissions: student diversity and affirmative action, and an increased focus on communication skills. To determine if GPA and MCAT…

Currently, e-learning systems are mainly web-based applications and tackle a wide range of users all over the world. Fitting learners' needs is considered as a key issue to guaranty the success of these systems. Many researches work on providing adaptive systems. Nevertheless, evaluation of the adaptivity is still in an exploratory phase.…

Professional Development Schools (PDSs) are collaborative ventures between schools and teacher training institutions. We identify the characteristics of a school that lead to successful PDS collaboration, relating them to Teitel's model (2003) that merges the principal standards of collaboration with the stages necessary for developing a PDS. We…

Our recent review of content assessments revealed that language expectations and proficiencies are often implicitly embedded within the assessment criteria. Based on a review of performance assessments used in high school biology settings, we have found a recurring discrepancy between assessment scoring criteria and performance expectations. …

This article provides an analysis of student responses to an exercise used in a computer ethics and a software engineering course to raise awareness of issues related to hiring, including issues of professional responsibility and diversity. Students from two different universities were asked to evaluate four candidates for two positions in a…

Using a critical race theory framework, this study examines the ways in which race and racialized ideologies are manifested in high-stakes college admissions, the debate over affirmative action, and the college choice behavior of Black high school students. This study allows for the voices of Black high school students in California to describe…

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to investigate whether having a graded attendance policy would have an effect on course attendance among college students, and (b) to examine beliefs about education and attendance policies among college students. Results support the utility of graded attendance policies for increasing class attendance…

In order to successfully match students and jobs in the medical profession of their choice, and at the same time meet the country's health care needs, it has become evident that access to medical schools and the various medical professions should be tightly regulated, in particular by a "numerus clausus." In most Western countries,…

This article evaluates changes in racial and ethnic composition of three Texas universities following the ban on affirmative action imposed by the 1996 "Hopwood" decision. The authors estimate the extent to which universities practiced affirmative action before the ban and evaluate how officers at these universities responded by changing…

The present paper tackles the issue of the higher education funding system in Slovenia. Its main attribute is that institutions are classified into study groups according to their fields of education, and funds granted by the state are based on their weights or study group factors (SGF). Analysis conducted using data envelopment analysis tested…

The peer evaluation model of university teaching is composed of three domains of behavioral and cognitive skills which, in combination, represent the elements expected of professionally competent teachers. These domains are: (1) the conception of the professional role for which students are being prepared; (2) instructional design; and (3) the…