Purpose: The paper aims to investigate the role of educational development centres, and their potential for playing a broader and more central role in quality and organisational development. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on the results of three external evaluations of educational development centres in Denmark and Norway,…

Objective: The authors describe the complexity of social processes for implementing technological change. Once a new technology is available, information about its availability and benefits must be made available to the community of users, with opportunities to try the innovations and find them worthwhile, despite organizational resistances.…

The Indian higher education system is one of the largest of its kind in the world. In spite of several built-in quality controls, such as the University Grants Commission's guidelines and the affiliating functions of the university, a deterioration in the quality of higher education was a serious concern for all stakeholders. In 1994 India…

Cross-border higher education raises a number of challenges and there is a growing awareness among quality assurance agencies that they have to work together to address these challenges. The joint effort of UNESCO-OECD to develop "Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education" is an educational response to this need. This paper…

An examination of national and regional developments relating to quality assurance and accreditation systems in the three main countries having a campus of the University of the West Indies, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, provides an appreciation of some of the emerging provisions in the region to respond to the concerns of the…

In this paper the grades awarded in the subject level review process that ran in England between 1995 and 2001 are examined. These grades have subsequently been used to sustain most published league tables and are often cited in debates about institutional quality. However, the grades were never subject to any moderation, either at the time of the…

Objective: To predict psychiatric hospital length of stay (LOS) for a sample of Illinois Department of Children and Family Services wards across 4 fiscal years. Method: A prospective design was implemented using the Children's Severity of Psychiatric Illness scale, a reliable and valid measure of psychiatric severity, risk factors, youth…

Program reviews became widely used as quality assurance activities in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Since then, they have evolved as an essential component in demonstrating institutional effectiveness to accrediting bodies. The paper discusses various approaches to reviews with a focus on a recently reengineered institutional program…

The "Child Care Bulletin" is published quarterly and includes practical, informative articles based on current literature regarding topics important to policy-makers, child care providers, and parents. The Bulletin includes short articles, tips sheets, policy updates, interviews with leaders in the child care field, information from child…

This article deals with the governmental strategies basic to the construction of the European Higher Education Area within the Bologna Process. With regard to the actual reconstruction of German universities, these strategies are verified on a structural level, in individual and collective subject relations and also in the subject matter which is…

Purpose: This paper is the second part of a comprehensive report about a research study that aims to assess the relationship between the university experience and student outcomes as a means of determining a university's success in meeting its educational goals. Design/methodology/approach: While Part I has described the process of how data were…

Quality assurance in medical education is a complex matter. Institutions and external critics of accreditation processes often question the objectivity of peer judgements. Members of accreditation panels similarly often feel at a loss for a lack of mechanisms to help them arrive at a collective assessment of the performance of an institution. In…

This article explores the development of policy in quality assurance in higher education. While it briefly examines the broader context of quality assurance in South Africa in terms of the National Qualifications Framework as one of the political levers for establishing a quality assurance system in education and training systemically it focuses…

The political philosophy (from the U.S. Declaration of Independence) that "all men are created equal" succinctly captures the "raison d'etre" and phenomenal successes of American higher education. Today, the deepest commitment to this idea of fair play is affordable access to a higher education that offers the opportunity to cultivate knowledge,…

Whilst regulation is utilized by governments in Australia and internationally as a means of promoting quality standards in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services, a growing body of literature is critical of the detrimental effect of this regulation. Drawing on our investigation into early childhood teachers' perceptions of the impact…