Business schools around the world are seeking partner relationships that will support the growing need for well-educated business professionals. The dilemma for many U.S. regional business schools is the trade-off between establishing international partnerships while ensuring educational integrity through quality assurance. This assurance can be…

The international activities of academic institutions dramatically expanded in volume, scope, and complexity during the past three decades. This expansion raised the need to monitor and assess the process at various levels and ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of internationalization. This study has two main aims: first, to present a model…

This article examines the spread of new public management (NPM) across European education systems as it has traversed national boundaries. While recognising the transnational dimensions of the spread of NPM, the authors offer new insights into the importance of national contexts in mediating this development in educational settings by focusing…

In this article, different inspection models are compared in terms of their impact on school improvement and the mechanisms each of these models generates to have such an impact. Our theoretical framework was drawn from the programme theories of six countries' school inspection systems (i.e. the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Ireland, the province…

Schools in Abu Dhabi are going through a period of transformation and reform. The Abu Dhabi Education Council commenced a professional development plan for principals to enhance their capabilities to manage and initiate change in light of the reforms. This study was conducted to explore principals' perspectives on professional development…

Although many studies have addressed the issue of response quality in survey studies, few have looked specifically at low-quality survey responses in surveys of college students. As students receive more and more survey requests, it is inevitable that some of them will provide low-quality responses to important campus surveys and institutional…

This essay explores the tensions between internal and external quality assurance processes, making a case for the preeminence of internal actions to ensure the capacity of institutions to respond quickly and effectively to the rapidly evolving global conditions affecting all of higher education. As the forms and means of formal and informal…

Since its inception in 1992 Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills) has inspected schools under Section 9 of the Education (Schools) Act 1992; Section 10 of the School Inspections Act 1996; and Section 5 of the Education Act 2005. Pressure on England to improve its system of education has not only emerged…

This qualitative single-case research study was conducted to gain deeper understanding of the institutional processes to address shared governance accreditation criteria and to determine whether institutional processes altered stakeholder perceptions of shared governance. The data collection strategies were archival records and personal…

"The U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems" released in May 2012 is a new player on the scene of university rankings, after ARWU, QSWUR and THEWUR, but with a different perspective--that of whole nations. It has some new features that enhance its validity, but it also shares some of the conceptual and methodological problems…

The profound influence of globalization seems helping outshine the concept of "education" with the more flexible notion of "learning" in the education policies of major transnational organizations. With considerable differences in concepts, all of them are promoting "learning", more specifically LLL (lifelong…

The educational environment has been increasingly acknowledged as vital for high-quality medical education. As a result, several instruments have been developed to measure medical educational environment quality. However, there appears to be no consensus about which concepts should be measured. The absence of a theoretical framework may explain…

Educationalists are well able to find fault with rankings on numerous grounds and may reject them outright. However, given that they are here to stay, we could also try to improve them wherever possible. All currently published university rankings combine various measures to produce an overall score using an additive approach. The individual…

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's "Research Excellence Framework" (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to…

This National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) policy statement outlines the warrant for multiple, systematic approaches to obtain evidence of authentic student achievement. The importance of assessing student learning in college has yet to capture the attention of policy makers or the public. Indeed, few outside the academy know…