The change of disciplinary practices as an effect of peer review in re-accreditation: the case of humanities in Croatia

ABSTRACT

The efforts in establishing quality assurance schemes in Croatia have faced a relatively new task of evaluating their effect on multiple levels. The effects of institutional compliance with European and national quality assurance framework and introduction of higher education management approach tools for internal quality assurance are noticeable in the compliance parts of the re-accreditation reports. In contrast, analysis of open parts of re-accreditation reports in humanities has shown unexpected results. The reviewer teams’ recommendations are addressing positive disciplinary practices characteristic of the humanities and suggesting the improvements targeting the modifications of practices related to the cultural-cognitive aspect of academic discipline. Content analysis results outline that reviewers have detected institutional strengths related to teaching which correspond with traditional cultural-cognitive practices in humanities (soft-pure sciences) contrastively, recommendations for improvement are mostly related to research practices, which demonstrate characteristics of hard sciences.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality assurance
• role of peer review
• humanities
• disciplinary differences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).