From Design and Implementation to Impact of Quality Assurance: An Overview of Some Studies into what Impacts Improvement

Abstract

Attention shifted in recent years from design and implementation to use and usefulness of quality assurance. Scientific studies focus increasingly on quality assurance’s impact on curricula and individual teachers. Which factors influence follow‐up activities and what is their relation to improvement of education? One factor that we single out is teachers’ experience of quality assurance and how that influences the climate for quality work in higher education institutions, against the backdrop of the social context in which quality assurance was introduced. The article critically analyses a number of studies on the topic.

Notes

1. We realise—and agree—that staff members in higher education institutions, who are active in all kinds of activities besides teaching, may resent being called, reductively, ‘lecturers’, but for brevity we will do so nevertheless.

2. At least until 1990, the development in Central and Eastern Europe was separate from the one in the Western part of the continent, see Schwarz and Westerheijden (2004b) for comparison.

3. We use the term ‘colleges’ to denote non‐university higher education institutions (‘hogescholen’ in Dutch).

4. For brevity, we call supra‐institutional quality assurance schemes in a higher education system ‘national’ schemes, although Flanders may serve as an example for the increasing tendency for higher education to become part of the authority of sub‐national state governments (also, for example, the federal states in Germany, the regional governments in Spain, or the four parts of the former UK).

5. It might be contended that the currently rising popularity of multi‐dimensional ‘ranking’ (or information for choice of study locations as in the German–Austrian–Swiss CHE ranking [www.che‐ranking.de] and its Dutch clone Studiekeuze123 [www.studiekeuze123.nl]) is a belated turn to the more sophisticated type of information provision foreseen in Table 1. See, for example, Van Dyke (2005).

6. The apparently successful series of Tuning‐projects seems to indicate a ‘workaround’ achieving something like a European consensus through cooperation at the academic rather than the political level. Available online at: http://tuning.unideusto.org/tuningeu/

7. A self‐report without true evaluation was called a ‘self‐selling’ report by Frazer (1997), see also Table 1.

8. A follow‐up percentage around 50% was also reported in Frederiks (1996).

9. Within this perspective, a communication model was elaborated in Jeliazkova (2001)—only if the debate in the unit evaluated remains, or has returned to, the level of technical solutions, follow‐up can occur, but not as long as the conflict extends to values.

10. The fact that in the previous part of this article we still used ‘quality assurance’ reflects the fact that in much of the practice of external quality evaluation it remains the prevailing term. Moreover, it was chosen here as a fairly general term, without too many (negative) connotations.

11. This is the same mechanism underlying the ‘maze’ leading to follow‐up at programme level reported in Jeliazkova (2001).