"IMHE-Info" is the newsletter published by the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme of OECD. This issue includes: (1) Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society; (2) The Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO); and (3) City-Regions in Focus. Publications of interest, IMHE News, and a calendar…

The "Setting the scene" deliverable of the QMPP project (www.qmpp.net) has been authored by Mr. Ari-Matti Auvinen (HCI Productions Oy) and many QMPP project partners. In addition to the definition of the scope of the project, it includes also a good list of references to the literature of user-generated content as well as good web links…

Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states are trailblazers in providing access to high-quality, state-funded pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds: last year, the majority of all 4-year-olds attending pre-kindergarten in the nation were enrolled in SREB states. The SREB region also leads the nation in setting high standards of quality for…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)'s Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) provides internationally comparative data about students' reading achievement in primary school (the fourth grade in most participating countries). PIRLS also provides extensive information about the home and…

The recent release of another critique of accreditation provides an opportunity to sort through some of the mass of ill-informed rhetoric in Washington regarding the nature and limitations of collegiate approval processes. The new report, "Why Accreditation Doesn't Work and What Policy Makers Can Do About It," comes from the American Council of…

Education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has experienced major shifts and changes over the last decade or so under the National Education Reform. In that context there is recognition for schools to appreciate their local contexts and conditions regarding assessment. The National Educational Department is also aware of the fact that there is need for…

To provide a deeper understanding of issues related to collaborative reconstruction and simultaneous renewal, the author provides a historical perspective of professional development schools (PDSs) and an overview of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education PDS standards and assessment process, with a focus on inquiry and…

Models of telephone crisis intervention in suicide prevention and best practices were developed from a literature review and surveys of crisis centers. We monitored 2,611 calls to 14 centers using reliable behavioral ratings to compare actual interventions with the models. Active listening and collaborative problem-solving models describe help…

Access programs are facing increased scrutiny. Not all programs are equally effective. In an environment in which resources are short, funders increasingly require criteria that enable them to make informed decisions about program quality. As elaborated in this report , one role of a high performance board is to help develop benchmarks of…

As an analysis of context and rationale, and of the changing strategies and practice since the early 1990s, this article identifies the major arrangements for assuring and enhancing educational quality and touches on their characteristics, with a focus on the Japanese national universities. The effects of, and issues raised by, current strategies…

Quality in primary education is currently high on the education agenda in developing countries. What is quality? How can we effectively measure it? How can we achieve it? How can we improve it? The author considers two suggestions to be critical to answering these above questions and engages with them in this article: (1) place what is happening…

This paper investigates European Union (EU) education and training policies in the light of the evolving Lisbon agenda on improving the competitiveness of the EU. It examines the ways in which EU policies have developed over time, focusing on their legal basis, underlying principles, main forms of implementation and their impact on national…

Background: "Supported" employment stipulates that disabled people should have real jobs for real pay. This paper models kinds of supported employment, assesses how the support and placement features affect its outcomes and its quality from the perspective of the employees, and provides a dynamic model to help explore what types of interventions…

The article interprets a particular set of debates on whether quality assurance in South African higher education widens democracy or not. The interpretation explores the extent to which higher education quality assurance fulfils three conditions posited for democracy (inclusion, participation and enhancement), drawing in as points of reference…

The South African Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) is currently involved with its second round of national programme reviews in the field of education. Such national reviews are designed to foster quality and equity within the broader Higher Education (HE) system as whole, through peer evaluation and public discourse processes and…