For over a decade, global university rankings have played a growing role in the status competition in higher education. More recently, we have seen a proliferation in rankings of innovation and urbanization. In this article, we argue that while these new measurements bring with them some conceptual adjustments, they draw heavily on existing…

University rankings have been of interest to many specialists, academics, and independent researchers, who are affiliated to educational or scientific institutions. The matter was also the subject of discussion among students at the master's and doctoral levels about the feasibility of these rankings, whether there is any desired practical benefit…

The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national comparisons to be meaningful, the participating students must be representative of the target population. In this paper, we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high performing…

Rater-mediated assessments exhibit scoring challenges due to the involvement of human raters. The quality of human ratings largely determines the reliability, validity, and fairness of the assessment process. Our research recommends that the evaluation of ratings should be based on two aspects: a theoretical model of human judgment and an…

This paper examines interactions between the presence of top-ranked universities and other conditions that encourage regional competitiveness. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was conducted to assess the combined effect of the conditions. The analysis yields several noteworthy conclusions. First, no single condition is necessary…

The academic library plays multiple roles in the university, making even a nuanced analysis of service numbers inadequate for assessing the complexity of the library's value and contributions to the university's mission and success. This exploratory study uses social network analysis and a unique interlibrary loan (ILL) data set to examine…

Each country in the world has its own individual approaches to the quality assurance system of higher education, so the quality of educational services in each country is different. The developing countries should be guided by the standards and recommendations put forward by the world's leading countries in the field of the assurance system of…

This paper considers the widening access and participation agenda, its implications for higher education institutions (HEIs) and contends that it must be underpinned by strategic measurement and monitoring. Access is viewed through the following lenses: (i) supporting participation, and (ii) facilitating equity. Using mixed methods, the paper…

In Sweden, the local schoolboard has the ultimate responsibility for school quality and student knowledge development, and is held responsible if the expected outcomes are not met. Assisting the board is the superintendent who is the Chief Executive Officer. The aim of the study is to investigate the board's relation to and expectations of the…

This study aims to critically and systematically investigate the contemporary discourse within scholarship on world-class universities in different higher education context. It applies critical discourse analysis to review articles from some top higher education academic journals and books published between 2000 and 2019. Exploring the notion of…

Within the framework of the revised taxonomy of educational objectives created by Anderson and Krathwohl, this study attempted to describe the design and examine the learning outcomes of an intervention focused on the development of higher order thinking at an elementary education setting. A class of 21 sixth graders participated in the project,…

When seeking to explain the eventual outcomes of a higher education experience, do the personal attributes and background factors students bring to college matter more than what the college is able to contribute to the development of the student through education or other institutional factors? Most education studies tend to simply ignore…

The last three decades of board research has embarked on various aspects of school boards (Alsbury, 2008b; Delagardelle, 2008; Resnick & Bryant, 2010; Strauss, 2018) including characteristics of effective boards (Alsbury & Gore, 2015; Dervarics & O'Brien, 2016), importance of targeted school board trainings (Cook, 2014; Gann, 2015;…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), with its illustrative scales and salient features of spoken language at the reference levels, is widely used as the base for rating scales for performance testing. If practitioners want to measure and report even small gains in proficiency, they need to adapt the descriptors to their local context…

First Language (L1) has been assumed to play a role in Second Language ability (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). However, the interplay between them across skill, task, or scoring criteria is more complex (Hamp-Lyons & Davies, 2008). Using Many-Facets Rasch Measurement, this study investigates the main effects of examinee ability, rater severity,…