For social work practitioners to engage fully in efforts designed to improve the quality of social services, they need to understand what is meant by quality of care, grapple with its complexity, and know how to identify and leverage the key factors most likely to influence it. This article introduces a conceptual model that articulates numerous…

Kiyo are journals published by Japanese academic institutions. As a scholarly communication medium, they have inherent problems such as limited accessibility and lack of quality control. Despite these problems, they have evolved to comprise the majority of academic journals published in the humanities and social sciences in Japan because they fit…

This article outlines a methodology for characterising features of programme-level assessment environments so that the relationship between features of the assessment environment and students' learning response can be studied. The methodology was developed through the detailed case study of nine undergraduate degree programmes: one in each of…

This article provides the background and describes the processes involved in establishing a national approach to benchmarking the way universities engage with their local and regional communities in Australia. Local and regional community engagement is a rapidly expanding activity in Australian public universities and is increasingly being seen as…

This paper first presents and then discusses the attitudes towards and perceptions of education officers regarding introducing a school-based continuous assessment of speaking in the Botswana General Certificate of Secondary Education (BGCSE) ESL examinations as provided for in the BGCSE English syllabus in Botswana. Three categories of education…

The present report is a product of two ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) seminars, held in 2007, on current trends in European Quality Assurance. The first seminar, hosted by the Bulgarian National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency (NEAA), examined the situation in South-Eastern Europe. The second seminar…

Quality Matters[TM] (QM) is a set of standards to measure the quality of instruction and design in online or hybrid courses. Adopted by a growing number of institutions nationwide, QM is based on best practices and instructional design research. To meet or exceed QM standards requires that resources and learning activities in an online course…

One way to ensure the quality of education in schools in the developed countries of the West is through the use of national school inspections; an analysis of the inspection system used in England and Wales is offered here. The 1992 Education Act instituted a radically different mode of inspection in England and Wales. The act gave contracts to…

This high technology quality assurance and statistics training module is a part of the statistics unit for an algebra I or algebra II course. This module fits into high school math classes in which students compute and display measures of central tendency and variability. The module contains a description, objectives, and content outline--phase I…

Numerous misuses of statistics are described and illustrated, and ways of recognizing and avoiding such misuse are discussed. The following five categories of statistical misuse are identified: a lack of knowledge of the subject matter, the quality of the basic data, the preparation of the study and the report, the statistical methodology, and a…

The U.S. Department of Education's attempt to apply quality assurance methods to its own operations is discussed in this symposium. Three presentations, including handouts, charts, and outlines, describe the quality assurance techniques and research methodologies used by the Department and present some initial results of the program. The first…

The U.S. Army Dental Corps has implemented a new concept of dental care delivery, formally identified as the Improved Dental Care Delivery System. The concept is based on the conservation of professional manpower resources through the use of dental treatment teams employing expanded duty dental assistants. Dental Therapy Assistant (DTA) is the…

Currently, there is not a single university medical center in which an acceptable routine system to assure quality of care has been established. This may result from reliance on the structure of the medical education process as a proxy measure to assure that physicians perform appropriately in their role. Several studies have been conducted to…