No abstract

No abstract

Even though female students now make up more than half of all higher education students in many countries, the distribution of women across fields of study is still very uneven. This study examines the gendered nature of recruitment and dropout in higher education. Our results show that students who made gender traditional choices more often had an early preference for the study programme they enrolled in. Moreover, female students reported more often than male students that they had been encouraged by their parents and friends. However, unlike what we expected, there are no differences between students in gender traditional and nontraditional programmes with regard to encouragement from parents and students' confidence that they had made the right choice. While male students' dropout is unrelated to the gender composition of educational programmes, women drop out of female-dominated programmes to a lesser extent.

Even though the interaction between teaching and research at universities is a well-studied topic, it is difficult on the basis of available studies to draw any definite conclusions concerning the character of this relationship. This study, which is based on survey data, as well as interviews, shows that university faculty believe that their research influences their teaching and that their teaching activities have a positive effect on their teaching. They find, however, that research is more important for teaching than vice versa. The characteristics of the interaction vary between teaching on various levels and between disciplines. In general, the interaction is stronger at a graduate than at an undergraduate level. At an undergraduate level the relationship is stronger in the humanities and the social sciences than in other fields of learning, while there are no such differences at a graduate level. The findings are discussed on the basis of differences between disciplines and types of teaching.

No abstract

No abstract

The article examines whether the increase in international contacts among university researchers is an impact of a general globalisation trend, or whether it is an effect of policy initiatives on national and supranational levels such as EU research programmes. The present study demonstrates that the sheer volume of international contacts among Norwegian university staff has increased substantially during the last 20 years with respect to conference participation, guest lecturing, study and research visits, peer review work, research collaboration and international publishing. While patterns of international visits have not changed with respect to geographical pattern, research collaboration and co-authoring has become increasingly directed towards other European and Nordic countries. Moreover, we demonstrate a homogenisation between fields of learning regarding the degree of international contact, but there are significant differences in geographical orientation. We conclude that general trends of globalisation and regional policy initiatives from the EU are supplementary rather than contradictory with respect to international contacts among Norwegian university staff. Data are drawn from studies based on questionnaires carried out in 1981, 1991 and 2000 among all tenured faculty members of Norway's four universities.

The growing interest for measurement of learning outcomes relates to long lines of development in higher education, the request for accountability, intensified through international reforms and movements such as the development and implementation of qualifications frameworks. In this article, we discuss relevant literature on different approaches to measurement and how learning outcomes are measured, what kinds of learning outcomes are measured, and why learning outcomes are measured. Three dimensions are used to structure the literature: Whether the approaches emphasise generic or disciplinary skills and competence, self-assessment or more objective test based measures (including grades), and how the issue of the contribution from the education program or institution (the value-added) are discussed. It is pointed out that large scales initiatives that compare institutions and even nations seem to fall short because of the implicit and explicit differences in context, whilst small-scale approaches suffer from a lack of relevance outside local contexts. In addition, competence (actual level of performance) is often confused with learning (gain and development) in many approaches, laying the ground for false assumptions about institutional process-quality in higher education.K E Y W O R D S assessment, higher education, knowledge, learning, learning outcomes, measurement