Research and Training in Higher Education: The State of the Art

The author presents a tour d'horizon of the field of higher education studies, including research on higher education, citing the relevant publication series and journals dealing with the subject, the strongest institutions, worldwide, offering university level studies in the field, and the antecedents of the endeavour. It is growing in importance as higher education institutions and systems expand, diversify, and become increasingly complex, requiring more and better insights regarding themselves for various purposes. The field needs to more fully tap findings in parallel interdisciplinary fields and to publicize the results of private institutional endeavours such as institutional research. A very glowing prognosis for higher education studies is given.     

Can nightmares become sweet dreams? Peer review in the wake of a systemwide administrative mandate

In 1993, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte enacted a mandate requiring peer evaluation of teaching, including class-room observation, for non-tenured faculty. Participants involved in the AAHE Peer Review Project feared the mandate would taint efforts to introduce faculty to collegial approaches to the peer review of teaching. As reported here, negative fallout from the mandate has been balanced to some degree by the positive effects of having a required evaluation system. Departmental culture shaped peer review activities undertaken in the first year and may have ultimately overshadowed effects of the mandate on the project.Deborah M. Langsam is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. A mycologist specializing in aquatic fungi, Langsam earned her baccalaureate degree from Brooklyn College, M.A. from the City University of New York, and her Ph.D. in botany from Duke University. She is also a winner of the NCNB Award for Teaching Excellence, serves as the UNCC campus project coordinator for the AAHE Peer Review of Teaching project, and has led numerous workshops on teaching portfolios. Philip L. Dubois is Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. A political scientist, Dubois earned his baccalaureate degree at the University of California at Davis and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He assumed his current position at UNCC in 1991, after having served fifteen years in faculty and administrative posts at University of California-Davis.     

Predicting Academic Success: A Longitudinal Study of University Design Students

This article presents a longitudinal study, over eleven years, of the academic progress of a cohort of design students (n = 475) at a major Australian university. The students were from four different spatial design disciplines: architecture, industrial design, interior design, and landscape architecture. The article identifies cognitive variables that may predict future academic success. This research uses regression analysis to identify correlations across a range of variables, in particular exploring the relationship between university entrance scores, subjects studied at school (art and graphics) and academic success as defined by university grade point average and time to completion. This study shows that prior knowledge in art and graphics is not a useful predictor of future academic success, while university entrance scores and first year performance are related to ongoing academic success. These results suggest that for the design disciplines explored here, discipline‐specific prior knowledge is not an important requirement for university entrance.     

Congruence between mother and handicapped child's view of the child's sense of adjustment

The responses of 22 physically handicapped children to selected items of the Piers‐Harris Self Concept Scale for Children were compared with their mothers’ responses to equivalent items of the Personality Inventory for Children. The direction of the responses, whether children were more or less positive in self‐evaluation than mothers perceived them to. be, was analyzed with respect to sex of child, type of school attended, and diagnosis of handicap (cerebral palsy or spina bifida). Only diagnosis of handicap was significantly related to the tendency for children to be either less or more positive in response to the items than their mothers, with cerebral palsy children more positive and spina bifida children consistently less positive in direction. Possible explanations are considered, with particular reference to the children's views regarding peer relationships.     

Exploring the influence of gender and gaming competence on attitudes towards using instructional games

Digital games are evolving beyond the solitary context into a ubiquitous, social and collaborative experience. Addressing beliefs about technology and attitudes towards technology‐mediated processes is fundamental to the successful implementation of any innovation. In collaborative gaming, attitude towards gaming influences learners' interactions along the domain, technology and community dimensions. Building on various seminal works, an instrument was developed for measuring four components of attitude towards gaming—affective components, perceived control, perceived usefulness and behavioural components. The survey, including 21 statements each scored on a 5‐point Likert scale, was used with a sample of college students to investigate the influence of gender and gaming competence on attitude towards gaming. The pedagogical implications of the different attitude components are discussed in relation to game design and to the different interactions triggered by the gaming context.     

Relationships between student characteristics and self‐, peer and tutor evaluations of oral presentations

There are many influences on how assessors grade themselves and others. Oral presentations are useful for exploring such factors in peer, self‐ and tutor marked assessments, being rapidly completed and assessed, commonly used in HE and very difficult to anonymize. This opportunistic study examined the effects of gender and level of attainment on the triangulation of marks awarded to student presenters. Grades generated by peer assessment were associated more strongly with tutor‐awarded marks than those from self‐assessment. For self‐assessment there was a strong effect of gender (female students undervalued their performance compared with tutor grades). Peer assessment produced higher marks than from tutors, perhaps because of the close‐knit community developed during residential courses. For tutor marks, the greatest variability was at the lower end of the scale, whereas peer assessors were most variable when marking students who self‐evaluated or peer assessed highly. Students awarded a narrower range of marks to peers compared with tutors, but when self‐assessing used a larger range. Presentations by students who admitted to little sleep the night before received lower grades from both peers and tutors, but this was not reflected by self‐assessments, suggesting they were unaware of their poorer performances. Sessions with fewer talks (four rather than seven) reduced the ‘dip’ in marks previously observed in the middle of sessions. Findings are discussed in the context of bias in this mode of assessment.     

Piecing Together the Puzzle of Pictorial Representation: How Jigsaw Puzzles Index Metacognitive Development

Jigsaw puzzles are ubiquitous developmental toys in Western societies, used here to examine the development of metarepresentation. For jigsaw puzzles this entails understanding that individual pieces, when assembled, produce a picture. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) completed jigsaw puzzles that were normal, had no picture, or comprised noninterlocking rectangular pieces. Pictorial puzzle completion was associated with mental and graphical metarepresentational task performance. Guide pictures of completed pictorial puzzles were not useful. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 52) completed a simplified task, to choose the correct final piece. Guide-use associated with age and specifically graphical metarepresentation performance. We conclude that the pragmatically natural measure of jigsaw puzzle completion ability demonstrates general and pictorial metarepresentational development at 4 years.     

The structure and evolution of industrial clusters: Transactions, technology and knowledge spillovers

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between location patterns, innovation processes and industrial clusters. In order to do this we extend a transactions costs-based classification into a knowledge-based taxonomy of clusters, along the lines suggested by a critical revision of the main assumptions underlying most of the existing literature on spatial clusters. Our arguments show that the transactions costs approach and the innovation and technological regimes framework are broadly consistent, and that real insights into the microfoundations, nature, and evolution of clusters can be provided by these classification systems.