Designing Retention Research for Assessment and Enhanced Competitive Advantage

Tertiary Education and Management - Based on a longitudinal study of entering freshmen at a selective, private college in northeastern USA, this article provides a model for designing retention...     

Effective University Leadership and Management of Learning and Teaching in a Widening Participation Context: Findings from two national Australian studies

Abstract

The paper argues for the need to increase student participation in university governance, especially in relation to high‐level decision‐making concerning the aims and mission of tertiary institutions. The paper examines the arguments in favour of, and against, student participation in university governance. It also provides an overview of the findings of recent empirical studies on the topic. The need for a process of negotiation in the setting of higher education aims is emphasised and several suggestions are offered regarding ways of increasing student involvement in the aims‐setting process.     

Research Experiences of Staff within a Specialist UK Higher Education Institution: Challenges,opportunities and priorities

The study discussed here was based on a collective case approach involving a specialist UK higher education institution. Six individual interviews were carried out with a cross-sectional sample of the institution’s staff members. Additional information was gained through observations and examination of relevant documents. These data were interrogated with the purpose of exploring how the institution had made the transition from a teacher training college to a teaching-led higher education institution with a particular commitment to developing research capacity. This analysis yielded a number of key findings: first, the institution had experienced a cultural shift, with research forming a more noticeable profile; second, practitioner-oriented research was the dominant research endeavour; and third, there appeared to be an incomplete understanding of the potential of research to change a staff member’s career and teaching practice. The article concludes by giving consideration to the implications of the findings.     

Getting Pole Position: Research strategies in the Humanities at Swedish universities

The aim of this paper is to study research strategies in the Humanities in Sweden. The Swedish higher education sector is under transformation and a new funding system has been proposed. The study investigates the university strategy processes, mainly at the dean’s level. The results show that most institutions are active in order to be well prepared when a new funding system is launched. There are, however, big differences between universities in attitudes towards the proposed changes as well as the level of activity.     

The influence of performance-based management on teaching and research performance of Finnish senior academics

Despite the widespread use of performance-based management in higher education, empirical research on its actual impact has remained scarce, particularly in Europe. With agency theory as a framework, our study utilised survey data collected from Finnish universities in order to explore the influence of performance management on perceived teaching and research performance of senior academics. Our findings suggest that, although academics hold a quite positive view of performance measurement as such, this attitude does not correlate with perceived high performance in either teaching or research. Moreover, our results suggest that perceived high performance among academics still relates primarily to acknowledgement from the academic community and academic achievement rather than to measurement and financial incentives.     

Collegiality and managerialism: a false dichotomy? Evidence from the higher education literature

Collegiality and managerialism are often portrayed as opposed ideas or practices, with the latter, in particular, either held up as a necessary response to the massification of higher education or portrayed as a betrayal of long-held academic ideals (as supposedly reflected in collegiality). This article explores how collegiality and managerialism have been conceptualized, presented and researched in the higher education literature. It concludes that the two concepts are not as dichotomous as some have argued, and that both have a role in our thinking about the future of higher education.     

Taking stock of taking equity: The last frontier of university technology transfer

This paper addresses the question of what potential success factors are relevant when developing and managing higher education–business partnerships. To shed light on this question, the paper presents a review of research literature on the possible success factors in university–industry relations. To shed further light on the factors identified in the literature, this paper reports on an empirical study of cross‐sector collaboration between four regional universities and energy firms in Norway. The empirical study should be seen as a “relevance check” of the factors identified in the extant literature on university–industry collaboration, within the particular context of education‐related partnerships. Based on the review and case studies, implications for management and further research are discussed.     

Is There a Need for a European Institutional Research?

Recent changes in European higher education have accompanied a strong desire and need by national ministries to have comparable data across institutions and a growing recognition from campus leaders that effective planning and decision-making requires reliable institutional data and analyses. This has induced changes and restructuring of duties and roles of administration, administrative staff and academic staff. In North America, internal institutional data analysis is often referred to as institutional research. We examine the roles and functions of institutional research within North America and how the changes within European higher education have created a purpose for institutional research. Specifically, we explore the topical areas of institutional assessment, data management, institutional governance, as well asthe changing identity of academic professionals within European universities. Within our examination, we explore in-depth one European country’s higher education system to demonstrate how history, culture and legislative changes manifest into a need for institutional research.     

Where is the gap between internationalisation strategic planning and its implementation? A study of 16 Dutch universities’ internationalisation plans

A dominant concern with internationalisation through the past decades has been the process of strategic transformation of universities. While strategic management has been perceived as a necessary and useful approach in the construction of internationalisation, many criticisms have been levelled against the application of strategic management in internationalisation. One of these criticisms is the ‘implementation gap’ between internationalisation strategic plans and their actual outcomes. Based on interview data collected from 73 key actors involved in internationalisation at 16 Dutch public universities, this research identifies 12 elements that comprise the concept strategic management and illustrates how educational practitioners in different sectors (research universities and universities of applied sciences) and job function levels (central and faculty) prioritise these elements. The key contribution of this research is the clarification of the areas where the ‘implementation gap’ exists and the causes of this gap. The findings of this research are particularly important in the midst of uncontested popularisation of strategic management, because they can help universities to reduce this gap and improve the effectiveness of their strategic management practices.     

The Effectiveness of Academic Boards in University Governance

Despite considerable international literature acknowledging issues associated with the effectiveness of university academic boards (also known as academic senates or faculty senates), there is little current empirical research exploring why difficulties might exist and what (if anything) might be done about them. This article reports the findings of case study research conducted in Australian universities, which examined fulfilment of academic board terms of reference and perceived academic board strengths and weaknesses. Based on the data, the article then considers the characteristics of one particular “effective” academic board. It concludes by highlighting some potential implications of the research for those universities seeking to enhance the future role and function of their academic board, which include discussing the apparent importance of latent or tacit functions of university academic boards, versus those functions or responsibilities which are formally documented, and the building of intellectual and symbolic capital for their respective universities through a focus on the substantive quality of core academic programmes.     

Aspired Convergence,Cherished Diversity: Dealing with the contradictions of Bologna

This article addresses the inherent tension in the Bologna process between the aim of convergence and the will to maintain the diversity of national higher education (HE) systems, as well as the decentralised and autonomous nature of national policy formulation on Bologna reforms. Starting from an analytical discussion of the concepts of convergence versus diversity in the Bologna documents, it assesses empirically the degree of convergence achieved so far between the HE systems of Germany, the Netherlands, France, and England. The result is that convergence in several dimensions was only modest between 1998 and 2004. The article concludes by reflecting upon this finding and discusses the implications. The policy proposals put forward are (1) to acknowledge and stress the merits of the Bologna process other than convergence, (2) to engage in a second round of reforms more clearly targeted at convergence, and (3) to address mobility and recognition issues independent from convergence of degree structures.     

联合国教科文组织国际农村教育研究与培训中心在中国的实践与探索

1.国际农村教育研究与培训中心的成立早在上个世纪90年代,联合国教科文组织就首先提出农村教育的发展问题,并通过建立“中心”来推动世界农村教育的发展。1994年11月8日,根据联合国教科文组织第27届大会第159号决议,联合国教科文组织国际农村教育研究与培训中心(简称INRULED)在中国保定成立。“中心”的建立是联合国教科文组织推进全民教育发展目标的一个重要措施,其主要任务包括:促进国际农村教育研究以及农村教育研究方法和技术的开发;推进会员国之间在制定农村人力资源开发政策方面的合作;建立各国农村教育研究专家联系和信息交流网络…     

Departmental Publication Productivity and Reputational Quality: Disciplinary differences

Using US national data, this study examines the levels and interactions between reputational rankings, average publications, citations, and external research support across 30 disciplines. The analyses show great variation among the disciplines in average and range of publications, citations, and external research support. They also show that the intercorrelations among the measures vary greatly by discipline. For example, the correlation between average publication level and reputational rankings was substantial in chemistry (.87), but weak in industrial engineering (.20); the correlation between the level of research support and reputation was strong in psychology (.74), but very small in astronomy (.14). Comparison of departments ranked in the top 10 with those ranked near the bottom showed that it was possible for departments to rank very high in a discipline but have publication, citation, and support levels below departments ranked near the bottom. The implications for quality and increasing status in higher education are discussed.     

竞争优势来源问题研究综述

竞争优势是企业战略的中心课题,对竞争优势的研究伴随竞争的激烈程度不断深化.通过对竞争优势来源问题研究成果的综述,旨在透过诸如成本、差异、产业集群、技术创新、企业文化等获取竞争优势的途径,发现隐藏在其背后企业真正的竞争优势本源所在--人力资源管理.     

Policy development and educational research: The Hungarian experience

Heather Eggins (ed) Women as Leaders and Managers in Higher Education Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press, July 1997. ISBN 0335 19879 1 Price: hb £45.00 pb £16.99 160 pp     

高等教育专业评估研究进展理路与发展趋向

通过对专业评估和专业认证的概念界定,分析了当前国内外专业评估研究的现状和特点,指出当前专业评估研究的特点是既有一定的发展又存在诸多不足,并阐述了下一步研究的趋向是要构建有中国特色的专业评估认证理论和实践体系。     

Factors Affecting the Decision to Merge: The case of strategic mergers in Norwegian higher education

Students (N = 1,883) from 10 European countries answered a web questionnaire pertaining to three dimensions of what they expect and what they experience from their teachers. The dimensions were personality, classroom environment, and teaching style characteristics. Parametric statistics identified high communalities among variables, while gender, program type, and program level were found to have an influence on factor groupings. Overall, the gap between the expected and the experienced proved to be overwhelmingly significant.     

Not just another evaluation: a comparative study of four educational quality projects at Swedish universities

In this study, four recent self-initiated educational quality projects at Swedish universities are compared and analyzed. The article focuses on how the universities have handled the tension between external demands and internal norms. The aim is to contribute to an improved understanding of quality management in contemporary universities. On the one hand, the projects are found to be built on similar rationales associated with accountability, reputation building and strategic management. This is interpreted as a response to the shared external policy context. They are also found to mirror similar ambitions regarding raising the status of education. On the other hand, the projects are found to differ considerably in their actual design, methodology, implementation, stakeholders and outcomes. This is interpreted as an active adaptation to the unique internal academic norms and cultures that exist in each university.     

传承与超越:新时期日本大学的教育改革与发展政策

为振兴日本高等教育,日本文部科学省结合实际,制定了教育振兴基本计划;大力支持大学的教学内容和方法的改革;实施产学研结合的高端人才培养计划;加大投入资助各大学特色教学改革项目;开展高素质教师培训计划,提高教师教育与研究水平等,这些政策为日本新世纪教育理念和人才发展战略的如期实现提供了有力保障。     

我国高等教育管理研究的突出问题及发展思路

我国高等教育管理研究存在着重注解论证,轻反思批判,长经验描述,弱范式意识,重哲学思辨,轻实证理解等问题。在其未来研究中,应厘清真理性与合理性、科学性与政治性、国际化与本土化、理论与实践、多元共存与统整融合等之间的关系,加强学科积累,实现学术变革,进行范式转换,推进理论创新,从而满足高等教育管理实践的需要。