Purpose: This paper aims to examine the everyday practices of academic work in social science to understand better academics' learning. It also asks how academic work is enacted in relation to the discipline, department and university, taking temporality as its starting point. Design/methodology/approach: The study sought to trace academic…

This paper seeks to analyse lecturers' views on how they understand academic development in order to elucidate current arguments around how knowledge is codified in higher education, and to what end. Whilst work of this nature has been carried out in a number of national and institutional contexts, much attention has been given to research…

The term "success" in higher education has been used widely to describe multiple outcomes, practices, and variables. In doctoral education, in particular, the study of success is paramount as only 50% of those students who enter doctoral education actually complete the degree. The definition of success, however, remains elusive. This study…

In this article, the author explores ways to determine what students learn in college and how well colleges teach them. The author offers two markers--one for graduating students and one for the institution from which the students graduate. The first marker, a comprehensive examination in a student's major, would be required as a condition of…

Changes in a Home Economics curriculum at Lehman College of the City University of New York from 1979-1988 are examined, and a line of inquiry first reported in 1983 is continued. A secondary, feminist analysis of the earlier data, combined with the current data, discloses the extent to which the patriarchal academy will go to attack the…

A study of whether true grade inflation existed at a college, the scope of the problem if it existed, and what corrective steps, if any, ought to be taken was limited to the years 1979-1986. Data suggest that true grade inflation probably exists or cannot be ruled out. (MLW)

The usefulness of Biglan's model of academic disciplines for examining how Yale University departments differ in their evaluations of undergraduate performance is studied. Biglan's 3-way model classifies departments according to (1) the degree to which they have a paradigm (hard vs. soft), (2) their concern with life systems as objects of study…

The purpose of the research program described here was to investigate college students' approaches to learning, and to determine the extent to which these reflected the effects of teaching and assessment demands rather than representing relatively stable characteristics of the individual learners. There were six main areas within the program: (1)…

Reviews how ethnicity, race, and gender affect women's professional participation in academia, particularly in psychology departments. Examines minority women's inclusion at undergraduate, graduate, job entry, and senior level positions within academic psychology; and reviews economic and social-psychological processes that unjustly serve as…

This study used a Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) approach to investigate relationships between student motivation, higher-order thinking skills, quality of teaching and learning, teacher student relations, student satisfaction with course contribution to their learning, and active learning strategies, with a sample of 2,190 undergraduate…