Outside of education, many academic disciplines developed and promulgated checklists to evaluate the quality of qualitative studies. This article used an embedded mixed methods approach in three stages: development of a conceptual framework reviewing 62 guidelines; a content analysis of key areas of the guidelines; and review of dissertations to…

This article is written with the recognition that, as higher education studies evolve as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, there is a need to reflect on the theoretical and practical concerns emerging from conducting higher education research. This is especially the case for early-career researchers who enter this relatively new field of study.…

The COVID-19 pandemic influenced academia in many ways, impacting learners and teachers. This article is authored by six sustainable urban development doctoral researchers from various backgrounds and stages of their journey, and an academic advisor. The article is an outcome of remote collaboration through a substantial period during the…

Ethnography as a methodological approach presents the fieldworker with many ethical crossroads throughout the research process. This is because of the unique position that ethnographers find themselves in, the environments that they research and the relationships which are formed. This paper presents four confessional vignettes from a broader…

In thinking about their experiences as community college advocates, Erin Doran and Kayla Lucht found that they both came to community colleges as adjuncts to supplement their incomes--but that a deep admiration and love for their students kept them there. Like so many others in higher education, they fell into their roles as community college…

As the number of articles on postsecondary topics expands, new methods are required to quantitatively understand the literature. Previous scholars looking at the higher education literature use manual coding, which limits the number of years that can be studied, or network analysis of citations and words, which does not yield groupings of articles…

Higher education, or more strictly higher education studies, is sometimes referred to as a discipline, though it is more often referred to as a field, sector or area for study. But what is a discipline and does higher education studies, at its current state of development, qualify as one? This article re-considers these matters and comes to some…

World-wide responses to the global pandemic, such as travel restrictions, border closures and lockdowns, have posed new challenges to researchers. For qualitative researchers conducting fieldwork, gathering data in person can be inapplicable (Howlett, 2021). My research investigates English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers' beliefs…

The challenges of conducting lengthy fieldwork in today's busy academic world have impacted the types of research that are able to be carried out. In particular, traditional educational ethnography has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs. This article analyzes data collected during a return to the field of a…

As the low-consensus field of higher education grows, it negotiates constraints and possibilities in the topics engaged and the scholars included. To trace the shifting patterns of research topics in higher education studies during the past 20 years, we examined networks of the topical structures of ASHE conference papers and a subset of U.S.…

In this article, taken from the 2019 ASHE Presidential address, Kristen A. Renn argues that to stay relevant and also to influence the direction of postsecondary education, there must be engagement in the will to reimagine the study of higher education. She discusses the challenges and opportunities for the future bound up in the fact that higher…

Research agenda setting is a critical dimension in the creation of knowledge since it represents the starting point of a process that embeds individual researchers' (and the communities that they identify themselves with) interest for shedding light on topical unknowns, intrinsic and extrinsic factors underpinning that motivation, and the ambition…

This article highlights several examples of student affairs practitioners and graduate preparation faculty engaging in the scholarship of practice. In doing so, these individuals merit a designation as scholars of practice because they are conducting research using their disciplinary knowledge and skill to address an institutional problem or…

The field of higher education studies has expanded dramatically in recent years. Notably, research centers/institutes and academic programs devoted to the field of higher education (tertiary education) has increased worldwide to now include peer-reviewed journals, books, reports and publications. Utilizing secondary data from 277 higher education…

This SoTL project explored sources of student anxiety and motivation across student assessment conditions of traditional numerical grading and pass/fail grading and sought to determine if pass/fail grading was helpful in lowering student anxiety while increasing student motivation to learn. Results indicated that students scored equally well on a…