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To be competitive, universities across the world are embedding an international perspective into every layer of an institution's operational structure. For higher education (HE) providers that offer sandwich degrees (4-year undergraduate courses with a compulsory placement after the second year), this allows students to choose a range of options. Students can enter the labour market for one year, or they can go overseas to study at a foreign institution. For some students, it might even be possible to do both. However, regarding final year degree performance, which option leads to higher student performance? In this paper, we aim to shed light on this empirical question. Our results are drawn from Aston University (UK) which is a world-leading University in Advanced Technology. Overall, using a large student dataset, we find that for students who have a compulsory placement built into their degree programme, the work placement has a more powerful impact on student performance compared to an international study placement abroad. Our findings have important implications for universities across the world that offer sandwich degrees to their students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part-time study is one of the foci of the widening participation agenda in the UK. The experiences of part-time students, however, have received remarkably little attention from scholars, especially in a comparative context. This paper explores existing historical data going back over a decade to identify the main themes of part-time experience at a number of UK higher education institutions and how it compares and contrasts with the full-time experience. The surveys use the Student Satisfaction Approach. The main themes emerging from institutional survey data over time are the work/family/study balance, assessment and feedback, access to learning and catering resources, and students' financial situation. There is sometimes a question of identity, but unlike many studies of part-time student experience, which focus on aspects of disadvantage, social, and cultural capital, the data for this paper indicate that many part-time students have a sense of themselves as being ignored or at worst marginalised in contemporary higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's 'Research Excellence Framework' (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls 'neoliberalism's war on higher education' or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education's competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many quarters, attempts are underway to identify learning outcomes in higher education which are context-neutral or ‘generic’; such measures could provide new ways to assess and compare outputs from higher education. This paper considers potential challenges in using such broad learning outcomes across contrasting disciplinary and national settings. An empirical contribution is provided by an analysis of data from the international REFLEX survey for Norwegian and English bachelor’s degree graduates. This sheds some light on the relationships between graduates’ broad learning outcomes (general competencies), their national contexts and their disciplinary area. It finds variations in competencies across subjects and countries, suggesting that general competencies of the type often suggested as generic learning outcomes may be unstable and problematic to compare across contrasting settings. It highlights the need for comparative research into variations in learning outcomes and graduate competencies considering disciplinary and national factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mathematics educators have long emphasised the importance of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings towards mathematics, as crucial in motivating (or not) its learning and use, and as influenced in turn by its social images. This paper is about images of mathematics. Our search for advertisements containing such images in UK daily newspapers, during 2006-2008, found that 4.7 % of editions included a 'mathematical' advert, compared with 1.7 % in pilot work for 1994-2003. The incidence varied across type of newspaper, being correlated with class and gender profiles of the readership. Three quarters of advertisements were classified as containing only very simple mathematics. 'Semiotic discursive' analysis of selected advertisements suggests that they draw on mathematics not to inform, but to connote qualities like precision, certainty, and authority. We discuss the discourse on mathematics in advertising as 'quasi-pedagogic' discourse, and argue that its oversimplified forms, being empty of mathematical content, become powerful means for regulating and 'pedagogising' today's global consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Salters Chemistry courses, context-led curricula for 13–16 and 17–18 year old students, first developed by the Science Education Group at the University of York in the UK, have now been translated and/or adapted in seven other European countries. This paper describes and discusses the different reasons for taking up the courses, the ways in which the courses were adapted, the difficulties faced and how the difficulties were usually overcome. The adaptors also suggest ways in which this work will develop in their countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]