For many years, the European evaluation community did not recognize evaluation standards as a relevant tool for quality assurance. References to the developments in the United States were exceptionally rare in the European evaluation literature during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the first articles on evaluation standards to appear in the European…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically test a new industry-specific scale, HEdPERF (Higher Education PERFormance) to capture the authentic determinants of service quality within higher education sector. Design/methodology/approach: The primary goal of this research was to test and compare the relative efficacy of HEdPERF against…

Evaluation of higher education can be described a species of its own with only few connections with other fields of evaluation. When considering the future developments in higher education evaluation (quality assurance), it is useful to observe its similarities and differences with various evaluation approaches in other than higher education…

During the past 40 years, health education has taken significant steps toward improving quality assurance in professional preparation through individual certification and program approval and accreditation. Although the profession has begun to embrace individual certification, program accreditation in health education has been neither uniformly…

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 study is aiming at examining the process of implementation of this higher education diversification policy in Vietnam, analyzing the opportunities and challenges that are facing the newly established non-public higher education institutions and to propose some orientations for their development in the current process of industrialization and…

This article explores the issues of trust, control, professional autonomy and accountability in higher education quality assurance in the UK. The main part of this article is conceptual, but it includes results from semi-structured interviews with academic staff that were conducted at two "new university" business schools. Both…

Purpose: This study investigates how the increased use of part-time and nontenure-track instructors may result in grade inflation. Design/methodology/approach: This research uses ten years of registrar data at a Midwest State (USA) institution to perform a multiple regression grade analysis. Findings: Evidence is found that part-time and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review for USA and international academic faculty and administrators of the dominant themes and history of quality and assessment in both industry and Higher Education, and how they relate to each other in order to stimulate and encourage debate as well as influence policy.…

This paper attempts to explain how the German higher education system strategically used quality assurance, through the new system of accreditation, to offer globally recognisable degrees such as the Bachelor's (Bakkalaureaus) and Master's (Magister) degrees. We also discuss the types of effects that this strategy has produced on the current…

Academics, although committed to quality in research and teaching, continue to resist quality assurance processes within their universities. This apparent paradox reflects a series of disputes surrounding issues of power, definition and efficacy. This article reports on a study of 30 academics from 10 Australian universities and details their…

Many educators choose to believe that learning to read and write is as natural as learning to listen and speak, even though scientifically based research does not support their belief. However, most educators (as well as the public) believe that most students must be taught mathematics to learn it. Moreover, there is a body of research evidence…

This brief identifies the features of high-quality after-school settings that have emerged from the research and are reflected in program quality tools. It also examines key research linking program quality to positive developmental outcomes; it reviews current practice in program quality assessment; and it offers considerations for policymakers…

The use of rigorous assessment in an Information Literacy program can be used to persuade reluctant faculty and administrators to buy into a program. A "culture of assessment" also assures quality control for internal and external audiences. Information Literacy at Wartburg College is unique in that it is a required component of five…

Prior to 1991, all higher education institutions in the Soviet Union were state institutions. There were some 900 higher educational institutions in 1990, including only 70 major universities, still referred to as VUZy, from the Russian "vysshee uchebnoe zavedenie". This acronym is popularly used to refer to all types of higher education…