Innovative Higher Education最新文献

Reducing student attrition and drop-out rates is of paramount concern for higher education scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in evaluating institutional effectiveness. There is some evidence that students’ satisfaction can be critical to the success of any postsecondary educational institution, but little is known about how campus environments shape students’ satisfaction. Using structural equation modeling techniques, the authors use multi-institutional survey data to examine the relationship between Culturally Engaging Campus Environments (CECE), sense of belonging, and satisfaction. Specifically, we explore the direct effects of CECE indicators on satisfaction and the mediating role of sense of belonging. Our results showed that a direct effect of CECE indicators is positively associated with satisfaction. Results also indicated that an indirect effect of CECE indicators contributes to a significant increase in satisfaction through sense of belonging. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This study aimed to improve the implementation of a redesign of teacher preparation programs at a large public university in the United States. This complex redesign impacted over 150 courses across 27 programs, involving over 200 faculty and 2,500 students annually. Implementing the redesign posed significant challenges for supporting fidelity and agency across all faculty involved, including many part-time faculty and new hires. We aimed to improve implementation by improving the faculty’s knowledge, confidence, and perceived usefulness of implementation fidelity practices. To do so, we developed two interventions: a series of individualized course fact sheets and an online orientation module. To study the effects of these interventions, we used a convergent mixed methods approach. Results showed that those faculty who used the new course fact sheets had significant increases in their knowledge and confidence of implementation fidelity practices and significant increases in their sense of teaching agency. The results also showed more positive outcomes for those using the fact sheets than those who participated in an orientation module. This study has important implications for faculty and administrators in higher education, demonstrating the potential of course fact sheets as an innovative, scalable solution to improve the implementation of large-scale redesigns.

While prior research often depicts a dire scenario for postdoctoral scholar employment and career trajectory, we offer evidence of postdocs’ agency despite challenging circumstances. Through interviews with 30 postdocs employed full-time in the United States, thematic analysis illustrated postdocs’ demonstration of agency as an asset they bring into their employment. We review prior literature about individuals’ sense of agency and argue for the extension of considering agency to postdocs. Our findings emphasize the importance of recognizing postdocs’ sense of agency amidst efforts to improve systemic issues within the research enterprise.

We approach productivity in science in a longitudinal fashion: We track scientists’ careers over time, up to 40 years. We first allocate scientists to decile-based publishing productivity classes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. Then, we seek patterns of mobility between the classes in two career stages: assistant professorship and associate professorship. Our findings confirm that radically changing publishing productivity levels (upward or downward) almost never happens. Scientists with a very weak past track record in publications emerge as having marginal chances of becoming scientists with a very strong future track record across all science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Hence, our research shows a long-term character of careers in science, with one’s publishing productivity during the apprenticeship period of assistant professorship heavily influencing productivity during the more independent period of associate professorship. We use individual-level microdata on academic careers (from a national registry of scientists) and individual-level metadata on publications (from the Scopus raw dataset). Polish associate professors tend to be stuck in their productivity classes for years: High performers tend to remain high performers, and low performers tend to remain low performers over their careers. Logistic regression analysis powerfully supports our two-dimensional results. We examine all internationally visible Polish associate professors in five fields of science in STEMM fields (N = 4,165 with N_art = 71,841 articles).

Historically, classrooms have utilized stationary furniture, facing front toward a centralized instructor position, and limiting student-to-student interactions. Such classrooms often stem from design processes that tend to focus on building codes and feedback from investors, architects, and planners, which leaves little input from instructors and students until the end (Britnell, et al., 2009). With little to no input from primary users, classrooms can become less inclusive or inaccessible in a variety of ways, especially for students with disabilities. One way to address this problem is to design flexible learning classrooms so that instructors and students can customize the room. Seemingly more inclusive, we wanted to understand how the physical elements of a flexible classroom create opportunities and barriers for students with disabilities. This mixed-methods study includes data from an online survey, interviews, and digital drawings. We utilized a purposeful sample of students with documented disabilities (n = 16) and used the eight universal design goals as our main coding schema. Results show students carry expectations and predictions about their classrooms based on the layout or arrangement; students’ social comfort can override physical comfort, even while expressing medical needs; students might misunderstand certain elements of flexible classrooms; and students can identify ways they were distracted by the room. Institutions and instructors interested in creating more inclusive spaces need to be intentional with flexible learning classrooms so that students can understand and utilize the affordances of these spaces.

University leaders play crucial roles in steering and fostering change within higher education institutions (HEIs). Drawing upon the complexity leadership theory (CLT) and organizational trust, we investigate how university leaders trusting staff with responsibilities tied to digital change contributed to an institutional culture of innovation. Through 68 interviews with staff members working in 8 European study programs, we found that leaders exhibited trust by creating flat hierarchies, sharing decision-making, and ensuring a safe space for experimentation with educational technologies (EdTech). This led to staff being intrinsically motivated to engage with technology and innovate with new formats. We also found that university leaders sometimes used ‘trust’ to justify allocating the responsibilities of digital change to the shoulders of staff without providing support such as infrastructure, funding, and guidance. This contributed to demotivation and stifled innovation. This study highlights the importance of university leaders trusting and empowering their staff members' creative processes with technology and supporting innovation within higher education.

While researchers have used qualitative and quantitative methods to study postsecondary education access opportunity for rural Black youth, the use of critical mixed methods approaches to examine postsecondary education inequities for rural Black youth is unrealized. The purpose of this paper is to highlight lessons learned in using equity-centered, participatory approaches to study postsecondary education access and opportunity for rural Black youth and to develop a critical, asset-based scale to quantitatively investigate postsecondary education opportunity and access for rural Black youth. This study is informative for researchers seeking to develop critical, asset-based measures and instruments, and for educators and policymakers seeking to attend to place-based and racial educational inequities.

Transnational education (TNE) occurs when higher education institutions traverse borders to provide educational experiences outside their home countries. Such mobility creates several research challenges, as such institutions exist between worlds. They must balance home and host country legal requirements, navigate home and branch administrative norms, adjust to differing cultural and learning expectations, and even serve different student populations. To understand this complexity, researchers must employ mixed-method approaches, which are currently limited in higher education studies. In this paper, we explore TNE as a unique setting for conducting research. We outline our design choices and the challenges we faced in conducting research on TNE institutions. For the paper’s central focus, we unpack a cross-cultural case study, which employs multi- and mixed-methods research, to assess the role of labor market outcomes at critical junctures of the student lifecycle at a binational university. By incorporating perspectives from the institution, alumni, and current and prospective students, we present a holistic view of perceived and actual graduate outcomes. This case vividly illustrates the limitations of mono-method studies. Furthermore, it demonstrates how mixed-method studies are useful for generating more meaningful outcomes in TNE research.

This study investigates the evolving landscape of green universities by analyzing and comparing rankings from 2018 to 2022. It expands beyond the single score offered by the UI GreenMetric, employing Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques to evaluate universities from diverse perspectives. Focusing on the top 50 universities from 2022, the study assesses their performance across six key criteria: setting and infrastructure, energy and climate change, waste, water, transportation, and education and research. Various MCDM methods (LOPCOW MEREC, CoCoSo, CRADIS, EDAS, MABAC, MAIRCA, and MARCOS) are implemented, revealing how they prioritize different aspects of sustainability. Furthermore, the study examines the correlation between rankings and employs the COPELAND aggregation approach to derive a unified ranking. This investigation not only contrasts MCDM outcomes with the UI GreenMetric’s total score-based rankings but also illuminates the relative significance of each criterion and its variation across weighting techniques. Additionally, the study delves into the temporal dynamics of university rankings, offering insights into institutional performance across different years.

As community colleges continue to face challenges in serving an ever-changing student population and a wave of presidential retirements, the next generation of senior community college leaders is surfacing. To prepare these top-level administrators, doctoral-level community college leadership (CCL) programs often serve as a viable mechanism for supporting leaders in their professional practice. Nonetheless, minimal knowledge exists about what benefits and skills alumni - current community college leaders - gain from doctoral CCL programs and how such programs and their directors build and evolve programming to meet their students’ needs. This qualitative case study employs the theory of planning practice to account for how directors shape CCL programming, ultimately uncovering how doctoral CCL programs’ processes contribute to programmatic priorities, curriculum, and evolution. Through interviews with seven doctoral CCL program directors and 16 alumni, our findings show the value of thoughtful program design, intentional curriculum, and evolution of programming to support students. Study implications call for further exploration across many directions, such as the role of an increasing shift to online programming and how alumni play crucial roles in recruiting and mentoring incoming doctoral students to CCL programs.