The higher education market has prompted universities to justify their value and worth, especially to students. In Australia, New Zealand and the UK, it is increasingly common for universities to advertise their vision to prospective students, through Graduate Attributes, and showcase the sets of skills and competencies their graduates would…

Students as partners (SaP) practices are emerging in today's universities as a means to offer a more participative agenda, and to transform institutional cultures within an increasingly economically driven higher education context. This study contributes to understandings of partnership approaches, which largely still remain under-theorised,…

The emerging literature related to feedback literacy has hitherto focused primarily on students' engagement with feedback, and yet an analysis of academics' feedback literacy is also of interest to those seeking to understand effective strategies to engage with feedback. Data from concept map-mediated interviews and reflections, with a team of six…

This article focuses on 'transition' and how it is understood within higher education. Drawing on data from concept map-mediated interviews at two institutions, we examine the conceptions of transition held by academic and professional staff, who work to support students' learning into and through higher education. We suggest that normative…

This paper offers an approach to support the development of reflective teaching practice among university academics that can be used to promote dialogue about quality enhancement and the student experience. Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within…

The study investigates how higher education staff understand assessment, and the relationship between these understandings and their assessment practices. Nine individuals attended a workshop that guided them through the creation of a concept map about assessment, which was subsequently discussed in one-to-one semi-structured interviews. We found…

After spending a year working on the development of a new online Master's programme in higher education, members of the development team were interviewed to reveal their thoughts about the nature of the programme. The dialogue of each interview was summarised as a concept map. Analysis of the resulting maps included a modified Bernsteinian…

The goal of this paper is to present the primary findings of the first of two phases of a research project that looks at how can undergraduates be supported to engage meaningfully with digital literacies in a rich-research context. My hypothesis is that students in the act of (re)-designing and implementing their personal learning environment with…

This paper reports a study into the development of staff understanding of assessment and assessment practice. Eight teachers from two universities constructed an initial concept map about assessment that was discussed in a one-to-one semi-structured interview. A year later, a new map was created and the interview focused on change in thinking and…

Pedagogic frailty has been proposed as a unifying concept that may help to integrate institutional efforts to enhance teaching within universities by helping to maintain a simultaneous focus on key areas that are thought to impede the development of pedagogy. These areas and the links that have been proposed to connect them are interrogated here…

This summary reports on a pilot of a novel, ontology-based e-assessment system in accounting. The system, OeLe, uses emerging semantic technologies to offer an online assessment environment capable of marking students' free text answers to questions of a conceptual nature. It does this by matching their response with a "concept map" or…

Competing notions of what a Ph.D. has been, is and should be are undercurrents in doctoral education. A longitudinal study of Ph.D. supervision based on interviews and concept mapping was used to surface understandings of the purpose of a Ph.D. This research tracks change over time for both the student and the supervisor. The data were analysed…

This study evaluated a model of student-engaged educational development. Despite widespread commitment to student engagement across many institutional activities, student participation as partners with faculty in teaching and learning enhancement has been identified as a threshold concept for educational development. This study sought not only to…

This article examines the contribution of older adults as co-researchers to the evaluation of a gerontological social work course. The evaluation was conducted at an Israeli college as part of a collaborative project with a United Kingdom university. Here, we follow the older adults who are service users through their transition to the role of…

In the quest for a better reflexive research practice and to respond to the challenge of expanding on an education research repertoire, the authors consider "situational analysis," proposed as a post-modern approach to grounded theory using maps. Originally situating their research projects within a social constructivist theoretical…