Student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) are used for various purposes, are omnipresent in academic teaching, and cause tensions within universities. Their analytical power is contested, and specific uses are problematised for negative effects on lecturers and academic relationships. This interpretive interview study addresses how…

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are an influential -- and often sole -- tool in higher education to determine course and teacher effectiveness. It is therefore problematic that SET results are disturbed by low response rates and response quality. An important factor discussed in prior research to increase SET effectiveness and students'…

In some institutions of higher learning, one of the approaches to successful governance is through student assessment of teachers, dubbed Student Assessment of Faculty or Student Evaluation of Teaching and extensively used in the United States of America (USA). In schools and colleges, the usual largest bloc and primary stakeholders are the…

We are four academics teaching mathematics at three different higher education institutions over two continents. Through fortnightly meetings to research how our practices changed as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, we formed a community of practice. The process of articulating our experiences and ideas, and reflecting on the recorded meetings…

Student evaluations of teachers (SETs) are often used to evaluate teachers' performance in higher education. However, several factors unrelated to performance can lead to biased SETs. The present experimental research was designed to examine whether native or non-native teachers could be evaluated differently by students in higher education. In…

Many institutions are making the move from pen and paper to online examinations, but the literature offers relatively few critical reflections on the ramifications of such a shift. This research presents evidence of the ways in which the social and human practices of online exams are deeply entangled with the material and technological, and…

About ten years ago, concerns were expressed about quality and standards in some universities of applied sciences (UAS) in the Netherlands. In response, a HBO report outlined a series of measures to improve the quality of assessment practices in UAS. This study provides recent analysis of lecturer perceptions of assessments of UAS with a view to…

This report and the accompanying online repository (https://sfdora.org/dora-case-studies/) bring together and analyse case studies in responsible academic career assessment. The case studies are intended to serve as inspiration for institutions planning to become or already engaged in a complex review process, and to provide potential pathways of…

To promote psychological literacy (PL) in our bachelor psychology teaching, over recent years we have implemented various modifications to our curriculum at the Utrecht University psychology bachelor program, with a focus on the societal application of psychology knowledge. To support psychology programs around the world in integrating PL in their…

The Science, Business and Policy Program (SBP) of the University of Groningen has been a work-based learning program for science master students since two decades. This program, a direct consequence of the Bologna declaration of education in Europe, has a distinctive position in European science curricula. Here, we use a web-based survey…

Despite the increasing popularity of formative assessment as an instructional tool, teachers find it difficult to implement formative assessment strategies in their practice. To address this we developed a training programme based on formative assessment and scaffolding literature. A quasi-experimental design was utilised to examine the…

Although the thesis is an integral part of the study programme, the way the guidance for this work is supervised can highly differ between supervisors. Writing the thesis is a complicated process requiring tailored guidance, that is often not feasible due to increasing numbers of students and need for efficiency. One possible solution is working…

Little is known about how the complex notion of higher education quality is understood and (strategically) handled by a specific group of key university actors: directors of educational programmes. A framing analysis of in-depth interviews was conducted to explore how bachelor-programme directors in Dutch social science departments understand and…

European institutions of higher education have increasingly sought to improve the accountability and transparency of teaching and research with formal procedures and performance criteria. In a longitudinal analysis conducted in faculties of social sciences and economics at universities in the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, we examined…

Student ratings of instruction (SRI) are commonly used to evaluate courses and teaching in higher education. Much debate about their validity in evaluating teaching exists, which is due to concerns of bias by factors unrelated to teaching quality (Spooren et al., 2013). Our objective was to identify peer-reviewed original research published in…