Search

Purpose Although a student’s sense of belonging is a key factor of persistence in higher education, research on international students’ belonging tends to rely on domain-agnostic survey measures and promote interpretations that focus mainly on social integration and adjustment. This paper aims to examine how male international graduate students in engineering understand and describe their sense of belonging and how they perceive its development at their institution. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 12 male electrical engineering doctoral students at a selective research university in the USA. This interpretive approach allowed students to articulate their subjective understanding of belonging within a specific disciplinary context. Findings Contrary to the broad notion that the social domain is the primary locus of students’ sense of belonging, participants emphasized the academic domain when referring to their struggles with, and attempts to develop, a sense of belonging. Results suggest that the meritocratic culture of engineering education may influence students to prioritize the academic domain when conceptualizing and developing their belonging. Moreover, the strong academic motivation endemic to international students pursuing graduate education at a top American research university intensified this mechanism. Originality/value This study argues that universities seeking to enhance international graduate students’ sense of belonging can be more intentional in providing opportunities for students to establish positive academic identities. Furthermore, addressing students’ non-academic identity and marginalization as relevant and essential topics in engineering will expand their understanding of what means to belong.

This chapter examines the practice of evidence-based policymaking in five Nordic countries. By comparing the references that national policy actors have utilized in their policy documents to evidentiate policy ideas and recommendations, it draws attention to the contextual factors that shape each country’s practice of evidence-based policymaking. The results illustrate that all five Nordic countries actively use evidence to support and legitimate their policy proposals; however, their utilization varies by (1) institutionalized forms of policymaking system, (2) degree of self-referentiality, and (3) type of reform. This comparative study offers timely reflections on how the discourse of evidence-based policymaking is interpreted and adapted differently across countries.

This chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological foundations of the research project. Drawing on research in social network analysis and sociology of knowledge, this chapter explains how bibliometric network analysis can be applied to examine the architecture of policy knowledge in the five Nordic countries. Key concepts such as networks, nodes, edges, centrality, and density are defined, and the rationale and procedures for collecting, analyzing, and presenting data are described in detail. This chapter also acknowledges the limitations in its methodological approach and proposes the direction for future studies.

Drawing on the construct of ‘externalisation’, this article examines how and why national policy experts use international knowledge in education policymaking. To understand how national policy experts deal with external source of information and expertise, I analysed the bibliographic references in policy documents prepared for an education reform and conducted network-cued interviews with local policy experts in the United States, South Korea, and Norway. The results revealed that national policy actors’ utilisation of international knowledge varies across countries in terms of frequency, function, and level of engagement. The national differences suggest that each country has internalised the act of externalisation in the national policy process, reflecting its own policymaking and reform contexts.

This policy study examines how policymakers and policy experts in Norway made us of research and studies – produced in Norway, in the Nordic countries and outside the Nordic region – to explain the 2020 incremental school reform. In total, 2 White Papers, 12 Green Papers and 3438 texts, cited in the White and Green Papers, were used as data for the text-based social network analysis. The three major findings were the following: First, the policymakers and experts make excessive use of references (on average, 246 references per White or Green Paper). The publications they cite are highly specialized and issue centred with little overlap between the various papers. Second, the policy references for the 2020 reform were mainly domestic. Approximately 70% of the referenced texts were published in Norway. Finally, the social network analysis enabled the authors to identify five texts that were influential and that bridged curriculum with quality monitoring reform topics. The authors suggest that more attention should be paid to an analysis of incremental reforms such as the 2020 reform in Norway. They identify a few of the blind spots that the more commonly used focus on fundamental reforms tends to produce.

The study presents a bibliometric network analysis of the two most recent schools reforms in Norway. Two research questions have been pursued: First, do the government-appointed expert commission use (in Green Papers) the same type of knowledge as ‘evidence’ for their reviews and recommendations as the Ministry of Education and Research (as reflected in the White Papers)? How has the use of ‘evidence’ changed over the two reform periods? Second, which body of knowledge amassed by the expert commission has the Ministry of Education and Science actually used for policy formulation? The network analysis shows (i) distinct changes in reference patterns over the two reform periods (e.g., average number of references more than doubled and references to international texts increased significantly), and (ii) an unexpectedly low usage of the ‘evidence’ presented by the expert commissions. The Ministry of Education and Research only draws on 9.5 percent of the references presented by the expert commissions. Strikingly, almost all of the adopted references are from a commissioned report that locally adapted and translated OECD’s Definitions and Selections of Competencies project. The authors suggest ‘studying up’ and paying more attention to how scientific ‘evidence’ is actually used, translated, and edited at the political level.