A survey of 67 external evaluators from professional associations, 80 department heads, and 162 department faculty investigated effects of a trial departmental-evaluation program in Taiwan universities, focusing on whether assessments conducted by professional associations were better and more appropriate than those conducted by the education…

Higher education systems in a number of countries are experimenting with programs that measure and enhance educational quality. Experiences suggest that the most successful quality assurance programs are initiated, maintained, and enhanced through the professional commitment of the faculty, not through quality assurance systems, administrative…

Examines English school inspection before and since 1993 reforms, observations procedures that some schools have adopted, and procedures of various colleges. The balance of accountability and support for improvement varies depending on the details and culture of inspection. In the United States, some experiments with inspection are occurring, and…

Discusses evaluation of higher education in Brazil, including the Institutional Evaluation Program of the Brazilian Universities (PAIUB) and its replacement by a National Examination of Study Diplomas. Describes background, early initiatives regarding quality, and the new governmental approach to quality evaluation (including the new political…

Reviews commercial online resources specifically discussing the quality of content and ease of classroom integration. Reports on current events, television meets the web, primary sources, virtual field trips, online activities, and annotated web links. States that teachers should take advantage of the free resources and trial services offered.…

Health care practices continue to evolve with technological advances integrating computer applications and patient information management into telemedicine systems. Telemedicine can be broadly defined as the use of information technology to provide patient care and share clinical information from one geographic location to another. Telemedicine…

The proliferation of information on the Internet introduces new challenges for educators. Although the Internet can provide quick and easy access to a wealth of information, it has virtually no quality control. Consequently, the Internet has rendered faculty more essential than ever as teachers of the analytic and evaluative skills students need…

Informal Reading Inventories (IRI) are often recommended as instructionally relevant measures of reading. However, they have also been criticized for inattention to technical quality. Examination of reliability evidence in nine recently revised IRIs revealed that fewer than half report reliability. Several appear to have sufficient reliability for…

Accountability and reporting mechanisms go hand in hand with government programs that promote workforce development. This chapter describes current practice in the United States and suggests how institutional researchers can help improve the process of documenting outcomes. (Contains 1 table.)

In its effort to simplify the accreditation process, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education has limited the amount of documentation that a program can use to support its efforts for accreditation. With this "no frills" approach, the rubrics or scoring guides that accompany assessments provide critical information about the…

At the Archives Departementales des Pyrenees-Atlantiques, the encoding of more than forty legacy finding aids written between 1863 and 2000 is part of a program of digitization of the collections. Because of the size of the project, an external consultant, ArchProteus, has been brought in and specific management procedures have been put in place…

The article examines harmonization of higher education as an prerequisite of improvement of study quality in Lithuania. It overviews the development of higher education and criteria of university and higher non-university study programmes. An assumption is made that higher university and higher non-university studies are poorly harmonized and the…

The article presents the analysis of higher education internationalization, its conceptions and forms of manifestation. It investigates the ways and means of higher education internationalization, the diversity of higher school internationalization motives, the issues of higher education internationalization quality assessment, presenting an…

This paper assesses the value and relevance of geography education in the realm of professional development. It explores the potential of distance education to support lifelong learners through courses or modules that operate across international boundaries and incorporate materials from local and global contexts. The authors argue that…

This article provides a critical discussion of the neoliberal reforms of higher education focusing on new managerialism and New Public Management. It also distinguishes between democratic and market accountability regimes, examining how the former arise from classical liberalism and the latter from neoliberalism. The article then examines…