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Assessing student learning in ways that offer students, institutions and systems with sound information is a considerable challenge for higher education. Despite demonstrable progress, a disconnect remains between methods used for assessing learning, improvement and accountability. This muddled situation is illustrated through a review of contemporary practice in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and New Zealand. To advance research and practice, this paper contributes a structured set of criteria that practitioners can use to evaluate whether an assessment functions effectively across different levels of practice. These technical and practical criteria touch on issues such as sampling, the viability of aggregation, reporting and cost-benefit considerations. The paper tests these criteria by considering their capacity to drive multi-level improvement in education quality. It is contended that the criteria provide perspective and structure for reconciling the quantitative assessment of higher education quality at different levels of practice. (Contains 1 table.)

University policies are increasingly developed with reference to students' learning experiences, with a focus on the concept of the "student voice." Yet the "student voice" is difficult to define and emphasis is often placed on numerical performance indicators. A diverse student population has wide-ranging educational experiences, which may not be easily captured within the broad categories provided by traditional survey tools, which can drown out the rich, varied and gradual processes of individual development. There is no single tool that can be used to measure students' experiences. This paper draws on findings from four narrative inquiry studies, carried out in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, to illustrate how a narrative approach could be used to complement performance indicators. This provides a richer context for educators' understanding of students' experiences and for supporting and setting institutional agendas.

Supervision is generally recognised as playing a crucial role in the quality of a research student's doctoral experience and their academic outcomes and, in common with most areas of higher education, there is an oft-stated desire to pursue excellence in this important area. Excellence in research degree supervision is, however, an elusive concept and on close scrutiny most of the discussions of high-quality supervision, even those that purport to be identifying excellence, refer to competence rather than excellence. This paper examines two potentially national authoritative perspectives from which excellence in research degree supervision might be explicated (codes of practice and learning and teaching awards) from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom but concludes that the complex nature of the activity and the complexity of the concept itself mean that rather than identifying excellence in supervision we can only respond to claims for excellence.

This paper argues for an alternative approach to quality assurance in New Zealand universities that locates evaluation not with external auditors but with members of the teaching team. In the process, aspects of network theories are introduced as the basis for an approach to quality assurance. From this, the concept of networks is extended to curriculum design and implementation by communities of practice and a critically reflective model of curriculum and programme quality assessment situated within communities of practice is proposed. An example of a teaching team in a university science context is provided that highlights the characteristics of communities of practice and the tensions associated with programme quality assessment. It is suggested that the adoption of the proposed quality assurance approach would result in recommendations that are more likely to be positively implemented than current methods and hence lead to quality enhancement more rapidly.