Editorial

Citation

Srikanthan, G. (2009), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 17 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2009.12017baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 17, Issue 2

Interest in matters related to quality in the education environment spans a range from sublime philosophical basis for effectiveness in the area, to practical tools for going about assessing it. Now looking back at the contents of the issue after we have made a selection of suitable papers, we are surprised at the range we have managed to cover. We start at the broadest philosophical basis for academic research, then go on to examine a paradigm for quality improvement, and examine the influence of academic voice on higher education quality. From here on in we turn to look at the appropriate tools like a technique for gathering student perspectives, appropriate instruments for assessing service quality, and finally at another for conducting graduate employer surveys. Book reviews look at overarching issues like ensuring quality in graduate students’ work, and finally delivering “public good” through education. On the whole we have managed to touch upon a range of aspects of quality in education, hopefully giving the readers a holistic view of the sector.

In the first paper, Graham Badley sets the tone for research journal like ours with the question whether academic writing should be regarded as knowledge in the making and why all such writing should be continuously challenged. The approach taken in the paper is that of a reflective discussion that considers academic writing in context, knowledge, reflectiveness and helping others to contest academic writing. The paper concludes with the view that all academic writing and concept-mongering are properly open to rigorous challenge.

In the next paper, Barbara Leigh Smith and Jean MacGregor contend that learning communities represent a viable alternative to models from business, in the quest for quality in education. Quality improvement concepts from business have not been widely embraced in education, and many of its approaches to accountability seem to induce minimal compliance. This paper provides an overview of learning community theory and core practices, and four case studies of institutions that have made learning communities a long-term focus of their quality improvement efforts. The authors conclude that educators will draw rich lessons from this concise overview of learning community theory and practice, and the stories of the successful institutions.

In the subsequent paper, Patricie Mertova and Len Webster report on a research project investigating the academic voice in higher education quality in England and the Czech Republic. The paper presents the concerns and issues voiced by the academics and higher education leaders in both the higher education systems. The research utilised a critical event narrative inquiry method, which focuses on issues of complexity and human-centredness in the phenomena studied, which is claimed to be a novel qualitative research method focusing on extracting “critical events” in professional practice of individuals, in this case academics and higher education leaders.

In the next paper, Roediger Voss explores satisfactory and unsatisfactory classroom (student-lecturer) encounters in higher education from a student’s perspective. The critical incident technique (CIT) is used to categorise positive and negative student-lecturer interactions, to reveal quality dimensions of lecturer, and to reconsider which attributes of lecturer are likely to cause satisfaction and which dimensions mainly lead to dissatisfaction. The author claims that the CIT method is a beneficial tool for exploring classroom encounters in higher education, and hopes that the paper has opened up an area of research and methodology that could reap substantial further benefits for researchers interested in this area.

In the next paper, Ana Brochado examines the performance of five alternative measures of service quality in the high education sector. The paper attempts to develop insights into comparative evaluations of five measuring instruments of service quality in a higher education setting. Data were gathered from a 360 students of a Portuguese university in Lisbon. The scales were compared in terms of unidimensionality, reliability, validity and explained variance. The author concludes that two of the instruments studied, SERVPERF and HEdPERF presented the best measurement capability. The results are said to make available some important insights into how the five alternative instruments of service quality in a higher education context compare with one another.

In the next paper, Chenicheri Sid Nair and Patricie Mertova present a framework that can be utilized in the design of graduate employer surveys carried out by tertiary institutions as a form of monitoring their graduate attributes. The survey utilized a combination of means, involving telephone, e-mail and mail-outs during a period of approximately four months, contacting 2,753 companies in Australia and internationally. There are very few higher education institutions that have well-established graduate employer surveys. The Monash University Graduate Employer Survey outlined in this paper may offer some guidance to tertiary institutions considering the conduct of similar graduate employer surveys.

In the book review section to follow, Carey Denholm and Carolyn Philpott review the book Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation by Barbara Lovitts. It is based on a two-year study conducted in 2003-2004 of 276 experienced doctoral supervisors in nine research-intensive universities in the USA. The challenge is be able to stand back and to extract the essence from such detailed analyses of quality and the assessment of the various components of dissertation within a range of disciplines. The next step is then to choose just the right moment to expose candidates to how and what it is they think when reading drafts of chapters, how it is they determine the level of quality and, how it is they know when it is ready to submit for examination. All the same, carefully selected sections of the text would provide a useful tool in the preparation and mentoring of both candidates and academic staff in the development of uniform quality standards across the sector.

In the next book review, Adele Flood looks at the book Governance and the Public Good edited by William Tierney. The book deals with the issue of public good and the ways in which higher education serves the community in that sphere. The reviewer expects the foremost question in analysing any measure should always be “how is this going to affect student learning?” This crucial question is only approached vaguely in one of the latter chapters. Surely, the reviewer opines, that in a book on governance within the tertiary sector some of the issues associated with student learning could have been tied into the discussions. Otherwise it is in danger of maintaining a corporately driven agenda by default, negating the key underpinning principle on which the tertiary sector is based: that the public institution should provide opportunities for lifelong learning within the community in which it resides.

Finally, the editorial team hopes that the papers included for your consideration in this issue will provide inspiration for reflection, individually and collectively, to review some of the philosophies of, and practices for, quality in education.

G. Srikanthan