Student satisfaction and perceptions of quality: testing the linkages for PhD students

Student satisfaction and the quality of education are of compelling interest to students, academic staff, policy-makers and higher education researchers internationally. There is a widespread belief in their ‘cause and effect’ relationship. This paper tests these beliefs and explores how the level of student satisfaction is linked with the perceived quality of PhD education. Using expectancy value theory as a framework and interview data from PhD students and their supervisors, this paper suggests that satisfaction is not necessarily perceived as an indicator of quality education. Levels of student satisfaction can be influenced by students’ expectations prior to their study and their preconceived beliefs regarding the value of a PhD education. Concern is raised that an overemphasis on student satisfaction may pose a threat to the quality of PhD programmes, making it increasingly difficult for universities to retain their integrity and reducing the intellectual challenges that PhD students need to experience.     

Exploring dimensions of change: the case of MOOC conceptions

This paper addresses a relatively new phenomenon in higher education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and explores conceptions around this new and emerging development from the perspective of a number of stakeholders in the university. A phenomenographic approach is adopted. The study explores how different stakeholders at a university perceive the MOOC phenomenon, and reflects on how the many conceptions stakeholders adhere to are made meaningful for academic developers in their role as ‘partners in arms’. The conceptions run across a continuum from the local and narrow to the global and broad. The study identifies challenges to change agency in a higher education institution.     

Civics Education in Japan: Values Promoted in the School Curriculum

Civics and Social Studies are subjects the Japanese Ministry of Education has designated for civics education in schools. The ‘Courses of Study’ for these subjects, drawn up by the Ministry of Education, list the desired objectives and contents of all Civics‐related courses. The purpose of this article is to analyze the values promoted in the two levels of the civics education curriculum, namely the ‘Courses of Study’ and the approved textbooks. These are analyzed with reference to eight categories, which are: civic life, social cohesion/ diversity, democracy, fair government, economic life, self cultivation, national identity and internationalism.     

Massive Open Online Change? Exploring the Discursive Construction of the ‘MOOC’ in Newspapers

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been a prominent topic of recent educational discussion and debate. MOOCs are, in essence, university‐affiliated courses offered to large groups of online learners for little or no cost and are seen by many as a bellwether for change and reform across higher education systems. This study uses content and discourse analysis methods to examine how understandings of MOOC‐related ‘change’ were presented in US, UK and Australian newspapers. Drawing on detailed analysis of 457 newspaper articles published between 2011 and 2013, the findings point to a predominant portrayal of MOOCs in relation to the massification, marketization and monetization of higher education, rather than engaging in debate of either ‘technological’ or ‘educational’ issues such as online learning and pedagogy, instructional design or student experience. The article then considers the reasons underpinning this restricted framing of what many commentators have touted as a radical educational form—not least the apparently close association between MOOCs and the economics of higher education.     

All the lonely people: the struggle for private meaning and public purpose in education

This paper argues that the ‘new world order’ achieved at the end of the cold war is in crisis, not generated from the threat of ‘war’ between Christian and Islamic worlds but from within western societies, specifically from the growing commercialisation and ‘privatisation’ of social and community life which has uncoupled the systems and activities of society from the collective and individual purposes of people who comprise that society. Drawing on interview data (life and work histories) from three cohorts (1950s-1960s, 1970s-1980s, 1990s to present) of US and Canadian teachers, the paper identifies evidence of this crisis in the fields of culture, education and public service (e.g. in the turning away from public and towards private pursuits as the motivation for one's ‘life's work’ or ‘passion’). It also looks to these fields in the search for answers to what motivates people and sponsors their meaning-making, specifically whether privatisation should be our only route to human meaning. The paper concludes that the personal ‘missions’ that people bring to their employment may be accommodated in some parts of the business world where people are given freedom to pursue their own ‘projects’, but these are largely frustrated in the micro‐managed and re‐regulated regimes of the public sector. Indeed, without invoking some ‘golden age’, the sense of vocation, public duty and ‘caring professionalism’ that characterised the ‘top end’ and ‘backbone’ of the public sector is diminishing as large numbers begin to withdraw their ‘hearts and minds’ while implementing the mandates and missions of others.     

高职高专院校"两课"教学改革新探

本文针对"两课"教学中教学理念、传统教育及学生思想等三个方面存在的问题,对高职高专院校"两课"的教学改革进行新探,以期使"两课"教学达到预期的效果.     

Does access work? The relative performance of access students at a Scottish university

Since the mid-1980s there have been very considerable changes inparticipation rates of all age cohorts in higher education courses withinhigher education institutions and further education colleges in Scotland. Inparticular there have been disproportionate increases in the number ofentrants aged 21 and over to full time undergraduate and sub-degreecourses.The increasing heterogeneity of the undergraduate population raisesquestions of performance of the different populations of students. Whilstsome research has previously been carried out on the performance of mature,'non-standard' and 'non-traditional' students, existing data is constrainedby the restricted data sets of national admissions systems, and thelimitations of institutional record-keeping. In particular, littleinformation exists on students whose entry route is the Access Course despiteits designation as the 'third' route into higher education (DES 1987) and itsincreasing popularity as a mode of entry from the late 1980s to the presentday.In this study the performance of students admitted to the University ofStirling with a variety of traditional and non-traditional qualifications iscompared. Using detailed student records, fine distinctions by type of Accessprogramme or other mature entry qualifications and by points scores in GCE'A' levels and SCE 'Highers' are compared. We show that performance of formerAccess students bears a relationship to the extent of control that theuniversity exerts on the particular type of Access programme. We confirm thatnon-Access students who didn't enter the university direct from school, butwho came in with a variety of qualifications perform at least as well as'standard' entrants. Our studies of entrants with 'standard' qualificationsconfirms previous research that points scores are important indications ofsuccess or failure. Finally study of a discrete sub-set of former Accessstudents studying Mathematics and Science courses at the university showsthat their performance is slightly poorer than all Access students.     

False Uniqueness: the Self‐Perception of New Entrants to Higher Education in the UK and Its Implications for Access – a Pilot Study1

A central tenet of contemporary education policy relates to the desire to extend higher education (HE) provision to less advantaged groups (‘widening participation’). Our paper contends that a key behavioural obstacle to widening participation lies in the erroneous belief that persists among potential entrants from disadvantaged backgrounds as to their capabilities of succeeding within the HE environment – a perception that serves to deflate application/recruitment rates from such groupings. We test this ‘false uniqueness’ thesis using a sample of 127 new UK undergraduates, finding that students drawn from lower social class backgrounds consistently underestimated their abilities vis‐à‐vis the overall cohort.     

Professional dialogues: exploring an alternative means of assessing the professional learning of experienced HE academics

Courses are widely used to provide professional qualifications for higher education (HE) practitioners. However, the question of how experienced academics might gain recognition as professional educators without completing a course is not well explored. This paper introduces the use of professional dialogue for this purpose, describing an approach being applied within four UK universities. The paper discusses the value of the professional dialogue, drawing on assessors’ and participants’ voices to provide empirical evidence. Findings from the study suggest that ‘assessed dialogues’ provide a more authentic route to professional recognition for experienced HE academics, effectively synthesising professional development, the individual and organisational learning.     

Does mobility have to mean being hard to reach? Mobile pastoralists and education’s ‘terms of inclusion’

Nomadic groups are highly discriminated against in access to education services, and the 2010 Education For All Global Monitoring Report demanded urgent action to address their education deprivation. Mobile pastoralists, particularly, appear to be falling beyond the remit of migration studies in education, although they are among the most mobile people in the world. Pastoralists’ education inclusion has been promoted by models of provision across the ‘mainstream’, ‘alternative’ and Open Learning traditions, but examples from around the world show that each broad approach comes with identifiable ‘terms of inclusion’ that, in different ways, reproduce and/or challenge pastoralists’ marginalisation. Achieving political commitment to addressing the scale and extent of pastoralists’ education deprivation is not unimaginable, but contingent on significant reappraisal of mobility as a livelihood strategy and of the legitimacy of pastoralism as a sustainable contemporary livelihood.     

Thinking with Bourdieu: thinking after Bourdieu. Using ‘field’ to consider in/equalities in the changing field of English higher education

This paper uses Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’ as a tool to examine higher education participation in England in the context of diversified and differentiated provision. Admissions practices for courses in two institutions offering tertiary and higher education demonstrate how the official rules of the game shape the experience of students moving into and through HE on vocational and alternative routes. These examples suggest that rules created for the ‘selective’ part of the HE field can have perverse effects on other parts of the field, creating barriers rather than bridges for students seeking to participate in HE via alternative routes. The paper concludes by considering the strengths and limitations of using Bourdieu’s tools for understanding diversification in HE. Does using Bourdieu lead to the inevitable conclusion that diversity is a form of diversion, directing a proportion of the population through an easily accessible, but ultimately less rewarding path, or can Bourdieu’s tools suggest possibilities for transformation and change?     

Refugees and online education: student perspectives on need and support in the context of (online) higher education

ABSTRACT

Online education and in particular Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often regarded as a way to solve global educational challenges. In this article, we highlight the students’ uptake of such a ‘digital solution’. Presenting initial findings from a research project in Germany, we situate our investigation in the specific context of digital educational offers for refugees, using Kiron Open Higher Education as an example. Kiron has designed an innovative academic model, with MOOCs at its core, to ease refugees’ access into higher education. Drawing from student data of 1375 Kiron students we look at students’ actual usage of the offer and the accompanying support services as well as the difficulties refugee students face while navigating online higher education. Results show, amongst others, rather low completion rates in the online courses and point to a much more nuanced picture of how students make use of the offer – putting online education as an easy, straightforward formula to the integration of disadvantaged students into question.     

To keep America number 1: confronting the deep nationalism of US higher education

The Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, told Time magazine recently that America is in ‘an economic war’ with the world and ‘the importance of investing in long‐term research for winning that war hasn’t been understood’. This article argues that such comments are not just metaphorical or unfortunate word choices, but instead reveal deep truths about the role of American universities globally. The fact that people such as Birgeneau, as head of a ‘world class’ university, line up so readily behind US nationalism and militarism has serious implications for how we need to understand higher education not just in America but worldwide.     

Life-cycle educational choices in a system with early tracking and ‘second chance’ options

We study life-cycle educational transitions in the German education system which is characterized by early tracking and institutionalized branches of academic and vocational training, but with the possibility to revise earlier decisions at later stages. Our econometric model covers all major transitions ranging from primary education through secondary schooling to different forms of tertiary education and vocational training. We consider the role of previous decisions and background characteristics at each decision node and also study ‘indirect’ routes through the system. Our results suggest that a considerable proportion of the population takes ‘second chance’ decisions but that these decisions are as socially selective as the standard routes through the system. We also model unobserved heterogeneity and document the sorting of individuals along unobserved characteristics across the stages of the system.     

The influence of entry route to teaching on Irish pre-service primary teachers’ attitudes towards mathematics

Abstract

Research examining the characteristics of both qualified and pre-service teachers focuses on traits including gender, socio-economic and socio-demographic background, knowledge and a variety of relevant affective constructs. Studies also investigate such traits among entrants to initial teacher education (ITE). The desire for more diversity within the teaching profession has led to alternative entry routes to the teaching profession (consecutive model for post-graduates) for those who may be unable to gain entry via the traditional concurrent (undergraduate) route. Internationally, there are divergent viewpoints and practices in relation to the value and use of the respective routes. This paper presents a comparative study within the Irish context, examining whether the consecutive model route to ITE promotes diversity in terms of entrants’ attitudes to mathematics. The study examines the entry-level mathematics attitudes of two distinctive groups of ITE entrants, namely 419 concurrent and 59 consecutive elementary pre-service teachers, in one Irish ITE institution prior to engagement with their ITE mathematics education programme. It compares their enjoyment of mathematics as well as their beliefs regarding the value of mathematics and examines the extent to which any distinguishing differences are apparent among the respective cohorts using the Aiken’s Revised Mathematics Attitude Scale. Analyses indicate generally positive attitudes among both cohorts; however, differences are evident between the cohorts with the consecutive route cohort demonstrating particularly apposite attitudes. The findings support the belief that the consecutive ITE route holds merit and prompts further investigation regarding the unique dispositions that these entrants possess.     

Becoming and Being a Specialist: anticipating and experiencing higher education English

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses a hitherto largely neglected area of academic and pedagogic research in one of the most popular subjects in higher education — English. The authors examine student‐held views of what constitutes ‘English’, focusing for part of the discussion on reading and reading logs in routine English teaching. The first part of the paper concentrates on the quality of students’ insights into reading as revealed by the novel experience of keeping a reading log. The second part of the paper places this pedagogic experience in a larger context. Here, students’ own views of English, anticipated and subsequent to arrival in higher education, are evaluated. The authors apply different theoretical constructs in both their methodology and interpretation of findings. They conclude that one significant challenge for students in higher education English today is to adjust themselves, with a balance between flexibility and coherence, to a new techno‐cultural world. This world demands the intellectual capabilities both of self‐reflection and community affiliation in an expanding disccurse called ‘English’.     

Making the transition from further to higher education: the impact of a preparatory module on retention,progression and performance

Articulation across the further education/higher education (FE/HE) interface is of vital importance in addressing the government's widening participation agenda. Many institutions are grappling with how best to prepare students to make this transition particularly when they are direct entrants and join ongoing cohorts of students who are already familiar with the HE environment. At one new Scottish university, the generic module ‘Next steps at university’ aims to prepare students for life at university and to help them acquire the necessary key skills for coping with HE delivery and assessment regimes. This paper presents an overview of the basis on which the ‘Next steps’ module curriculum was designed with respect to content, delivery methods and assessment then analyses the performance and progression outcomes for 103 students who successfully completed the module. These outcomes are set within the context of institutional figures and the beneficial impact of ‘Next steps’ is explored in quantitative terms with respect to progression, retention and performance statistics.     

Rethinking difference and sex education: from cultural inclusivity to normative diversity

This paper aimed to problematise what is meant by ‘difference’ and consider what such a reinterpretation might mean for methodological interventions in sex education research. Our concern is the tendency for sex education research to treat difference as a set of categories to be ‘added-on’, such as religious difference, cultural difference and sexual plurality. The danger of this is that it leaves the normative unchallenged, confirming the hegemony of the heteronormative, unraced subject. Constructing difference as an ‘add-on’ fails to address how young people locate themselves in a world in which they negotiate their sexualities through complex ‘glocal’ routes in popular and youth culture. We argue that decentring methodological strategies are required which draw on critiques made by post-colonial and decolonising methodologies. In the first section of the paper, we review the problem of difference, and how it is considered within current debates in youth and sexualities research. This frames a reflection on rethinking our own methodological practices through a consideration of two research moments. In the conclusion, we propose a metaphorical framework to scaffold a reimagining of methodological approaches to ensure that the normative is always a question mark.     

Using developmental evaluation as a design thinking tool for curriculum innovation in professional higher education

This paper argues for the use of ‘developmental’ evaluation as a design-based research tool for sustainable curriculum innovation in professional higher education. Professional education is multi-faceted and complex with diverse views from researchers, professional practitioners, employers and the world of politics leaving little consensus about the nature of educational ‘problems’, let alone educational ‘solutions’. Developmental evaluation is an emerging approach to evaluating innovations and/or organisations that are in a continuous state of change; it asks the evaluators to not simply appraise a final design, but to work with designers through processes of rapid reconnaissance, mapping the territory and emergent modelling. This paper provides an account of how the adoption of the dispositions and approaches of developmental evaluation increased the trustworthiness of decision-making in the design of a new post-graduate teacher education degree in Australia. The principles of developmental evaluation as a design thinking approach have application in other complex curriculum settings.     

MOOCs的主要内容及优势

MOOCs作为一种大规模在线课程迅速席卷了世界各个角落。它在内容设计、学生学习、教师教学、教学测量与评价方面都不同于传统教学。MOOCs不仅有利于教师的教学、学生潜能的开发,而且能够促进教育公平、推动高等教育国际化,并为构建终身学习型社会打下基础。