Information about political processes is an important prerequisite for debates in the public sphere, which can strengthen the legitimacy of decisions. This article analyses how far both Commission communication and media news coverage contain information on (a) policy issues, (b) the policy process and (c) the actors involved and the positions they take. Data have been gathered through a qualitative content analysis of Commission communication output and the news coverage in two Dutch and two German newspapers with regard to two specific policies: the sustainable use of natural resources and wastes and the accession process leading up to the Eastern Enlargement. The results suggest that the Commission and the national media emphasize different aspects of the EU political process. This could pose problems in terms of the legitimacy of EU policies and the Commission's role therein.

The literature on first-year study success has identified a host of factors that may affect a student's chances of succeeding, ranging from personal circumstances to educational environment. One of the factors that often emerges in this context is (non-)attendance of classes, lectures and tutorials. Intuitively, one would expect this to be all the more important in programmes that employ a student-centred and interactive approach to learning, such as problem-based learning. Interestingly, there is little dedicated research that looks into the importance of (non-)attendance in such a learning environment. This article addresses this gap in the literature by looking at the effect of (non-)attendance on the study success of three cohorts of Maastricht University's Bachelor in European Studies (annual intake of 325-350 students). Controlling for a range of factors, we find that attendance matters for several measures of study success and also for the committed and participating student.

To ensure a smooth transition from studies to professional careers, students' skills and attitudes are often considered of greater value than theoretical knowledge and understanding. Yet, whereas typical academic skills such as research and writing are commonly monitored and trained, generic skills such as teamwork and communication receive scant attention. At Maastricht University, we developed a portfolio to raise awareness about skills required to take full advantage of the Problem-Based Learning environment, and to initiate self-reflection by students. As such, the portfolio also provides an opportunity to engage in a more in-depth assessment of students' skills acquisition. Students assessed their skills at the start of the bachelor programme through a survey that was administered again at two later stages during the first year. Comparing data of 414 students, we provide a unique insight into skills progression in an active learning environment. Repeated measures can thus provide a first impression of the impact of an active learning environment on generic skills acquisition. While we argue that the current portfolio achieves its educational objectives, as an instrument for measurement of skills acquisition it has its limitations.

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The Maastricht Treaty has widely been identified as a turning point in European integration. However, little dedicated research has been done into how 'Maastricht' affected media discourses about Europe. In this article, we aim to shed more light on this matter by means of a qualitative frame analysis of media discourses in Britain and Germany, two countries that have traditionally had different perspectives on European integration. We show that in the course of the debate about the Maastricht Treaty the media discourses in the two countries gradually converged along the same aspects of European integration and increasingly used negative values to evaluate these aspects. This convergence of debates can be seen as representing a nascent transnational public sphere for the discussion of EU affairs.© 2018 the author(s). published by informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis Group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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The representation of EU debates in the mass media has received comparatively little attention in studies on Euroscepticism, despite criticism on the EU having become mainstream since the early 1990s in particular. Recently, a number of salient crises have brought European politics to the fore like never before. This article presents an analysis of different types of criticism on and opposition towards the EU as present in media at the height of the Eurozone crisis in 2012. Using a four-fold typology, it looks at views about the EU and its policies as present in coverage by quality newspapers in Austria, Ireland and the Netherlands. An analysis of 1,085 claims from 454 articles shows that, rather than rejecting integration or EU involvement in certain policies, criticism was predominantly aimed at existing policies and on presenting different policy options.

Improving a self-assessment tool to monitor generic skills development in an active learning environment.