This book presents a wide range of international perspectives that explore the different ways the diverse forms of drama supports learning in science. It illustrates how learning science by adopting and adapting theatrical techniques can offer more inclusive ways for students to relate to scientific ideas and concepts. The theatrical processes by…

A customized guide about liberatory design thinking processes that have been tested within college settings to support changes that enhance equity in policies and practices within institutions. This research is based on case studies of several institutions, including focus group interviews with the campus design teams and an analysis of artifacts.…

Institutional researchers are often tasked with assessing why college-wide initiatives succeed or fail. This can be a difficult task: researchers need to discriminate between multiple feasible explanations, work with limited data, and produce compelling narratives. Process tracing is a qualitative methodology that enables researchers to make valid…

The African Data Initiative started as a crowd-sourced campaign to improve the teaching of statistics in African universities. The analysis of climate data provides one suitable context to illustrate ideas that lead to a radical new form of teaching. The problem within the context comes first, the technicalities are largely reduced -- mathematics…

Business leaders around the world are using emerging technologies to capitalize on data, to create business value and to compete effectively in a digitally driven world. They rely on data analytics to accelerate time to insight and to gain a better understanding of their customers' needs and wants. However, big data and data analytics solutions in…

As state governments seek to improve the performance of institutions of K-12 and higher education, they often adopt educational policies that have similar names but different characteristics across states and with variations over time within states. Yet quantitative analyses generally examine the absence or presence of an educational policy…

MDRC is working with the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office to study the state's efforts to improve college outcomes for Latinos--in particular, the approaches being taken at two-year and four-year colleges that qualify as Hispanic-Serving Institutions. This brief covers the first step in that project: a daylong conversation among…

This paper examines the role of United Nations (UN) peace academics in teaching for peace within the UN higher education system, and questions what contribution, if any, UN peacebuilding education makes to the broader field of peace and conflict studies education, and in the lives of the people it touches. The study draws on ethnographic data…

International strategic alliances are notorious for their high failure rate. Increased inter-partner conflict resulting from ineffective cross-cultural management is perceived to be one of the key reasons for unsatisfactory alliance performance. Driven by globalization, universities are extending into foreign markets through the establishment of…

Education is a process by which man transmits his experiences, new findings, and values accumulated over the years, in his struggle for survival and development, through generations. Accordingly, one of the aims of education is to strengthen the individual's and societies' problem solving capacity, ability and culture starting from basic education…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of combining event-centred and variable-centred approaches when analysing big data for higher education institutions. It uses a large, university-wide data set to demonstrate the methodology for this analysis by using the case study method. It presents empirical findings about…

Europe's knowledge economies need high-level skills, the capacity to innovate and to support democratic societies. In this perspective, the main objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of higher education and how this is promoted in various countries in Europe and beyond. The evidence, conclusions and…

Much importance is now placed upon the evaluation of outreach interventions by higher education institutions (HEIs). Accompanying this focus are requests that HEIs prepare evaluation plans. Yet, whilst some now have plans in place, others do not. One of the challenges for those preparing such documents is that official guidance is not prescriptive…

Learning analytic implementations are increasingly being included in learning management systems in higher education. We lay out some concerns with the way learning analytics--both data and algorithms--are often presented within an unproblematized Big Data discourse. We describe some potential problems with the often implicit assumptions about…

As learning analytics activity has increased, a variety of ethical implications and considerations have emerged, though a significant research gap remains in explicitly investigating the views of key stakeholders, such as academic staff. This paper draws on ethics-related findings from an Australian study featuring two surveys, one of…