Search

At a time when vocational education is seen as critical for national development, concern grows regarding how weak organizational culture and occupational commitment may threaten the production of quality graduates and teachers within the field. The failure of vocational institutions to effectively create human capital likely threatens the connections between Chinese industry and its educational institutions. This study thus explores how these connections are influenced by organizational and occupational factors. A multi-layer linear model is employed on data collected from 406 teachers from 69 Chinese vocational colleges and universities. Results suggest that organizational cultural positively influences industry-university cooperative behavior through the construction of strong occupational commitment and job involvement. This study not only enriches and expands new knowledge and academic perspectives, but also provides feasible policy suggestions to help guide educational administrators toward the improvement of vocational education., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Despite several attempts to provide a definite pattern regarding the effects of personality traits on performance in higher education, the debate over the nature of the relationship is far from being conclusive. The use of different subject pools and sample sizes, as well as the use of identification strategies that either do not adequately account for selection bias or are unable to establish causality between measures of academic performance and noncognitive skills, are possible sources of heterogeneity. This paper investigates the impact of the Big Five traits, as measured before the beginning of the academic year, on the grade point average achieved in the first year after the enrolment, taking advantage of a unique and large dataset from a cohort of Italian students in all undergraduate programs containing detailed information on student and parental characteristics. Relying on a robust strategy to credibly satisfy the conditional independence assumption, we find that higher levels of conscientiousness and openness to experience positively affect student score., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This study was intended to explore and confirm the factorial structure and to analyze the psychometric properties of an instrument for university guidance and tutoring, apply it, and detect differences between sociodemographic variables. A total of 1,048 students from five universities in the province of Manabi (Ecuador) participated. The study was divided into two phases with differentiated samples. An exploratory phase, made up of 200 subjects (19.1%), and another confirmatory phase, made up of 848 (80.9%), where the questionnaire was also applied. The results supported the three-factor structure of the instrument called "Questionnaire for the Assessment of Guidance and Tutoring in Higher Education" (Q-AGT), with of a total of 21 items. The indices of goodness of fit, reliability and internal consistency of the model were considered satisfactory. The application of the questionnaire did not show statistically significant differences in the assessment of university guidance and tutoring between men and women, with a high value given by both sexes to the importance of tutoring, the demands and the competences of the teaching staff in the university. The differences were mainly found between universities and branches of knowledge. Among the main conclusions, what stands out is the achievement of a valid and reliable instrument to measure the development of guidance and tutoring in Latin American universities. This contributes to the assessment of university guidance and tutoring as a strategy for the integral development of the student- personally, academically and professionally- and as a possible protective factor against academic dropout., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Providing less prepared students with supplemental instruction (SI) in introductory STEM courses has long been used as a model in math, chemistry, and biology education to improve student performance, but this model has received little attention in physics education research. We analyzed the course performance of students enrolled in SI courses for introductory mechanics and electricity and magnetism (E&M) at Stanford University compared with those not enrolled in the SI courses over a two-year period. We calculated the benefit of the SI course using multiple linear regression to control for students' level of high school physics and math preparation. We found that the SI course had a significant positive effect on student performance in E&M, but that an SI course with a nearly identical format had no effect on student performance in mechanics. We explored several different potential explanations for why this might be the case and were unable to find any that could explain this difference. This suggests that there are complexities in the design of SI courses that are not fully understood or captured by existing theories as to how they work., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This article examines men's involvement in an institutional gender equity award scheme and how their self-concept as allies develops over time. It draws specifically on a subset of qualitative data from the four men participating in a study involving in-depth interviews with university staff involved in the self-assessment team of one Australian institution's Science in Australia Gender Equality (SAGE) Athena SWAN pilot. Data related to the men's experiences is the article's focus. Key themes from the data include: 1) men's motivations for engagement; 2) men's self-understandings as 'champions for change' 3) the barriers/risks associated with male championship; and 4) men's evolving perceptions and critiques of the male champions model. Findings show that men demonstrated personal growth and increased awareness through their participation in the pilot. Yet, their frustration with how equity and diversity was managed in their organisational context highlights pitfalls in the concept of a male 'champion'. This article provides timely guidance for institutions seeking to engage allies in gender equity initiatives., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Despite the need to map research careers, the empirical evidence on career patterns of researchers is limited. We also do not know whether career patterns of researchers can be considered conventional in terms of steady progress or international mobility, nor do we know if career patterns differ between men and women in research as is commonly assumed. We use sequence analysis to identify career patterns of researchers across positions and institutions, based on full career histories of applicants to the European Research Council frontier research grant schemes. We distinguish five career patterns for early and established men and women researchers. With multinomial logit analyses, we estimate the relative likelihood of researchers with certain characteristics in each pattern. We find grantees among all patterns, and limited evidence of gender differences. Our findings on career patterns in research inform further studies and policy making on career development, research funding, and gender equality., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist

The importance of improving STEM education is of perennial interest, and to this end, the education community needs ways to characterize transformation efforts. Three-dimensional learning (3DL) is one such approach to transformation, in which core ideas of the discipline, scientific practices, and crosscutting concepts are combined to support student development of disciplinary expertise. We have previously reported on an approach to the characterization of assessments, the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol (3D-LAP), that can be used to identify whether assessments have the potential to engage students in 3DL. Here we present the development of a companion, the Three-Dimensional Learning Observation Protocol (3D-LOP), an observation protocol that can reliably distinguish between instruction that has potential for engagement with 3DL and instruction that does not. The 3D-LOP goes beyond other observation protocols, because it is intended not only to characterize the pedagogical approaches being used in the instructional environment, but also to identify whether students are being asked to engage with scientific practices, core ideas, and crosscutting concepts. We demonstrate herein that the 3D-LOP can be used reliably to code for the presence of 3DL; further, we present data that show the utility of the 3D-LOP in differentiating between instruction that has the potential to promote 3DL from instruction that does not. Our team plans to continue using this protocol to evaluate outcomes of instructional transformation projects. We also propose that the 3D-LOP can be used to support practitioners in developing curricular materials and selecting instructional strategies to promote engagement in three-dimensional instruction., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Tenure-track faculty members in the United States are evaluated on their performance in both research and teaching. In spite of accusations of bias and invalidity, student evaluations of teaching have dominated teaching evaluation at U.S. universities. However, studies on the topic have tended to be limited to particular institutional and disciplinary contexts. Moreover, in spite of the idealistic assumption that research and teaching are mutually beneficial, few studies have examined the link between research performance and student evaluations of teaching. In this study, we conduct a large scale exploratory analysis of the factors associated with student evaluations of teachers, controlling for heterogeneous institutional and disciplinary contexts. We source public student evaluations of teaching from RateMyProfessor.com and information regarding career and contemporary research performance indicators from the company Academic Analytics. The factors most associated with higher student ratings were the attractiveness of the faculty and the student's interest in the class; the factors most associated with lower student ratings were course difficulty and whether student comments mentioned an accent or a teaching assistant. Moreover, faculty tended to be rated more highly when they were young, male, White, in the Humanities, and held a rank of full professor. We observed little to no evidence of any relationship, positive or negative, between student evaluations of teaching and research performance. These results shed light on what factors relate to student evaluations of teaching across diverse contexts and contribute to the continuing discussion teaching evaluation and faculty assessment., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Improvement projects (IPs) are a fundamental element in any quality management system from any organization. In Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), IPs are constantly implemented to maintain excellence in academic and administrative processes. In this study, we propose a model for IP implementation that is based on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP). As a part of the model, we propose a series of research hypotheses to be tested. The data used to test the hypotheses were gathered from a questionnaire that was developed after an extensive literature review. The survey was administered to Mexican public HEIs, and more than 700 responses were collected. The data were assessed in terms of convergent and discriminant validity, obtaining satisfactory results. To test the proposed relationships between the model constructs, we utilized Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using the software IBM SPSS Amos. The analysis confirmed the statistical validity of both the model and the hypotheses. In conclusion, our model for IP implementation is a useful tool for HEIs that seek to attain excellence in their processes through IPs., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Reports of sexual harassment at medical faculties throughout the world, including the Radboud University, raised the question how prevalent this is at the Faculty of Science. We performed a survey among students to assess their experiences with harassment. This questionnaire consisted of questions from the EGERA survey, a questionnaire held among staff of multiple European Universities. We found that 9% of the respondents had observed or experienced harassment at the Faculty. Hardly any of these cases were reported to one of the institutional services. Moreover, most students did not now any of the provided services. We therefore suggest raising awareness on harassment and to make students more familiar with the trust person., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

During the past few decades, there has been a nationwide push to improve performance and persistence outcomes for STEM undergraduates. As part of this effort, recent research has emphasized the need for focus on not only improving the delivery of course content, but also addressing the social-psychological needs of students. One promising intervention type that has been proposed as a multifaceted way to address both cognitive and social-psychological aspects of the learning process is the learning community. Learning communities provide students with opportunities to build a strong support system in college and are generally associated with increased student engagement and integration with campus systems and cultures. In this study, we examine the impact of a learning community intervention for first-year biological sciences majors, the Enhanced Academic Success Experience (EASE) program. Incoming freshmen are assigned to EASE based on their SAT (or ACT equivalent) Math score, a metric demonstrated to be a key predictor of student success in the program. We find that enrollment in EASE is correlated with higher STEM course grades; an increase of 0.25 (on a 0-4 point scale) in cumulative first-year GPA; and gains in non-academic outcomes, such as measures of sense of belonging and academic integration. Further, these outcomes are more pronounced for particular subgroup populations. For example, whereas surveyed male students seemed to benefit academically from participating in a learning community, female students reported a greater sense of belonging in regard to the biological sciences major and reported higher values for behavioral indicators of academic integration. Lastly, we find that the EASE program is positively correlated with students' intention to stay in the biological sciences major. And, among the three race-oriented groups, this impact is most pronounced for under-represented students. In light of these findings, we discuss the potential of discipline-specific learning community programs to improve academic outcomes for students most at risk of leaving STEM majors, such as students underprepared for college level coursework., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Engaged scholarship, a movement that has been growing steadily since 1995, offers a new way of bridging gaps between the university and civil society. Numerous papers and reports have been published since Boyer's foundational discourse in 1996. Yet, beyond a growing interest in orienting universities' missions, we observed a lack a formal definition and conceptualization of this movement. Based on a scoping review of the literature over the past 20 years, the objective of this article is to propose a conceptualization of engaged scholarship. More specifically, we define its values, principles, and processes. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this new posture for faculty and students, as well as for the university as an institution.

A delay in PhD completion, while likely undesirable for PhD candidates, can also be detrimental to universities if and when PhD delay leads to attrition/termination. Termination of the PhD trajectory can lead to individual stress, a loss of valuable time and resources invested in the candidate and can also mean a loss of competitive advantage. Using data from two studies of doctoral candidates in The Netherlands, we take a closer look at PhD duration and delay in doctoral completion. Specifically, we address the question: Is it possible to predict which PhD candidates will experience delays in the completion of their doctorate degree? If so, it might be possible to take steps to shorten or even prevent delay, thereby helping to enhance university competitiveness. Moreover, we discuss practical do's and don'ts for universities and graduate schools to minimize delays.