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The integration of Ukrainian higher education into the European educational area is a key condition for its reform and development. It provides for the activation of cooperation between Ukraine and the European Union in the field of higher education, harmonization of higher education systems, deepening of cooperation between higher education institutions of different countries, increasing the quality and importance of higher education in social processes, expanding the autonomy of universities and participation in academic mobility programs. The model of the European integration of higher education in Ukraine was developed. It can be used by other countries, taking into account the national features of their educational systems. The completeness of the adopted decisions and implemented measures regarding the modernization of the structure of higher education and the National Framework of Qualifications, the introduction of modern standards and educational programs, the principles and mechanisms of their development and implementation, compliance with European norms of organisation of educational process were studied and evaluated. The process of development the National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance as the key element of the quality system was analyzed. It has been established that all measures are carried out according to European practices and are consistent with the goals set by the Strategy for the Development of Higher Education in Ukraine in 2022-2032. These are significant steps towards improving the quality of Ukrainian higher education. It was determined that certain components of European integration are still in the process of implementation. It was emphasized that significant efforts will be required to rebuild Ukraine as a whole, to restore and develop higher education, in particular, in the postwar period in connection with the losses incurred because of the aggression of the Russian Federation.

Digital contact tracing tools were developed to decrease the spread of COVID-19 by supplementing traditional manual methods. Although these tools have great potential, they were developed rather quickly resulting in tools with varying levels of success. The main issues with these tools are over privacy and who might have access to the information gathered. In general, their effectiveness varied globally, where users expressed privacy concerns associated with sharing identity, illness, and location information. This paper reviews these issues in deployments across Asia, Europe, and the United States. The goal is to begin a discussion that improves the design and development of digital technologies that not only improve the control of infectious disease spread, but also achieve an appropriate standard of privacy and security.

With the ubiquity of digital technology in K-12 education, digital competency frameworks for teachers have been published over the past several years that range from local initiatives to international standards. This study aims to understand how teachers' digital competence is envisioned and implemented in an ecosystem of existing frameworks, drawn from the initiatives of governments and organizations. A comprehensive search for information about teacher's digital competence frameworks was conducted, resulting in 20 documents that were analyzed in detail. The frameworks were compared on their (1) underlying rationales, (2) goals and (3) definition of digital competence for educators. The analysis started with the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu) as a focal point of the analysis and went in search of these frameworks to make a comparison. The findings indicate a large degree of alignment among the frameworks. The study shows that even if the competence areas differ in some way, the standards in the frameworks are closely related. This article aims to make a theoretical contribution to the categorization of teachers' digital competency.

This paper analyzes the key determinants of the quality of preschool education in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on the analysis of recent data, the paper indicates the status and development trends in this regard in the last decade. Although preschool education in Bosnia and Herzegovina has a long tradition, it is facing a number of challenges, mostly arising from the arrangement of the state system and post-war transition processes which have significantly impoverished this level of education. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to point out the recent public policy efforts made in the attempt to ensure the quality of preschool education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the effects that are being achieved in this regard. Since quality can be approached from the aspects of structure and process, the elementary structural and process dimensions of preschool education will be taken as units of this analysis. Conceptualizing the results of this analysis, the status and quality of preschool education in Bosnia and Herzegovina will be positioned through an orientation towards the European framework for the quality and development trends of preschool education in Europe.

The purpose of the study is to identify how the coverage of topics of the Code of Conduct for Research in Education in Ukraine is consistent with the ones from the United States of America (USA) and Europe. Furthermore, the study attempts to explore coherences in the documents so that these could be reviewed and addressed. The study used the methodology for mixed-methods systematic reviews to respond to the first research question and the survey research methodology to respond to the second one. It was identified that the research integrity and ethics terms were not sufficiently covered by the Codes of education and research organisations from Ukraine compared to the Codes from the USA and European Union (EU). It was found that there was a shift from emphasising the role of the researcher (contributor) in the Codes from the USA and EU to drawing the importance of regulatory and legal instruments for the maintenance of research integrity and ethics in Ukraine. The prescriptive wording in the Codes of professional organisations in the USA and EU was given much greater attention than in the Codes of educational and research institutions in Ukraine. The Codes of the educational and research institutions from Ukraine were considered to be tentatively consistent with the relevant ones from the database from the USA, and Europe.

The calibration of test materials generally involves the interaction between empirical analysis and expert judgement. This paper explores the extent to which scale familiarity might affect expert judgement as a component of test validation in the calibration process. It forms part of a larger study that investigates the alignment of the LanguageCert suite of tests, Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), the China Standards of English (CSE) and China's College English Test (CET). In the larger study, Year 1 students at a prestigious university in China were administered two tests--one with items based on China's College English Test (CET), and the other a CEFR-aligned test developed by LanguageCert--the LanguageCert Test of English (LTE). Comparable sections of the CET and the LTE involved sets of discrete items targeting lexico-grammatical competence. In order to ascertain whether expert judges were equally comfortable placing test items on either scale (CET or CEFR), a group of professors from the university in China who set the CET-based test, were asked to expert judge the CET items against the nine CSE levels with which they were very familiar. They were then asked to judge the LTE items against the six CEFR levels, with which they were less familiar. Both sets of expert ratings and the test taker responses on both tests were then calibrated within a single frame of reference and located on the LanguageCert scale. In the analysis of the expert ratings, the CSE-familiar raters exhibited higher levels of agreement with the empirically-derived score levels for the CET items than they did with the equivalent LTE items. This supports the proposition that expert judgement may be used in the calibration process where the experts in question have a strong knowledge of both the test material and the standards against which the test material is to be judged.

In Thailand, a series of policies have been implemented at all levels of Thai education. It is hoped that English language ability among Thai citizens will be improved. In primary education, following the English language education policy for primary school students introduced by the Office of Basic Education Commission (2016), English has been introduced to first graders onwards. They study English one hour every day, five days a week. When they finish grade 6, they should demonstrate their language ability at a CEFR A1 level. Various English tests have been used to check if the students are either proficient or able to achieve the learning goals. These tests include teacherprepared tests at the classroom level and the Ordinary National Tests, or O-NETs, at the national level. Essentially, the O-NETs are administered to the sixth, ninth and twelfth graders. Interestingly, although the CEFR has been implemented in our educational system, O-NETs test scores have not been aligned with CEFR. This research project focused on developing a local English language proficiency test for young learners. In this article, key considerations, and challenges in the process of developing the test are presented and discussed. It is hoped that the presentation and discussion are timely and beneficial for those planning to develop their own tests for use in their own contexts.

This convergent mixed method study aimed at exploring the English context of the widely used Emirates Standardized Test (EmSAT) by juxtaposing it to its sequel, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). For this purpose, the study used the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) international standards which is used as a benchmark for both tests. The study focused on comparing the EmSAT and IELTS test specifications and their alignment with CEFR standards. The test takers reported on the EmSAT in terms of five categories: Test Scoring, Test Presentation and Format, Test Delivery, Test Structure and Preparation Practice. The results of this study revealed that both the EmSAT and IELTS are not aligned rigorously with the CEFR standards. Moreover, the EmSAT aligned mostly with the lower measurement levels of the CEFR while the IELTS aligned with the higher levels of CEFR. The test takers of the EmSAT reported some advantages and disadvantages about the EmSAT. Precisely, the students assigned high agreement with the EmSAT Test Scoring, Test Presentation and Format, Test Delivery respectively and to less degree to Test Structure and Preparation Practice.

This study attempts to clarify Japanese youth participation policies' characteristics by analyzing four national youth policy documents in the 2000s. Compared with European youth policy, the article will investigate the challenges Japanese youth policy faces. Though recent Japanese national youth policy sees young people as active agents for society, Japan's youth participation policies mostly employ educational and volunteering approaches. Today's youth policy has reconsidered the inclination to promote voting behavior; however, the documents seldom cover new forms of the youth-led political movement and structural changes in youth policy governance. The reflection of young people's voices has recurrently been considered important over the decades. Yet Japanese youth participation policies only listen to youth via the Internet and roundtables. On the other hand, the Council of Europe's co-management system enables young people to influence the European youth policy decision-making process. Failing to conduct structural changes may lead to youth policy without young people.

Inspired by neo-institutional theory, we explore whether the semantics of diversity appears to be global and universal through computer-assisted content analysis of 2378 publications. Diversity discourses are dominant, but only in the USA and Canada, UK and Ireland and Europe, not being present in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Diversity is interpreted differently across regions influenced by the local socio-political settings. Academic literature on diversity first appeared in the USA and Canada in the mid-1970s in relation to race and gender. In other English-speaking countries, diversity gained momentum only in the mid-2000s, with inclusion, gender, ethnicity and cultural diversity being the dominant terminologies. Later in that decade, diversity appeared in the academic literature in Europe, often framed as inclusion and gender. We did not find any evidence that the semantics of diversity has become global or universal and, therefore, question the cultural globalisation and the worldwide standardisation of academic knowledge around the valorisation of individual and collective differences.

The article discusses the issues of forming a study program in the context of the process' compliance with the recommendations provided by Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), which are relevant for Ukrainian higher education. The study achieved its goal: the main prerequisites for the formation of the study program (SP) were analyzed, its structural and semantic parameters were determined, and a step-by-step model of concluding a quality study program in accordance with the ESG guidelines was suggested. The search for the materials on which the study was based was conducted using the following databases: scientometric (Scopus, Web of Science), the information system (online platform) of the National Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (NAQA), and the "Legislation of Ukraine" database. Quantitative methods included an online questionnaire, qualitative methods included system analysis, and other comparative method were used. Due to the contradictions between the interpretations of the concepts at the level of legislation and internal regulations, a definition of the "formation of the study program" concept is suggested. The components of the SP formation process, the resources required for the formation of the quality SP, and an analysis of positive and negative practices from the NAQA accreditation procedure experience, based on which the optimal model of the SP as a dynamic system based on ESG guidelines was developed, which has a functional character and is based on theoretical generalization of the latest approaches and real cases of Ukrainian HEIs, were discussed.

The aim of the study is to analyse the educational means facilitating the development of the linguocultural competence within the academic environment in Ukraine under conditions of the coronavirus pandemic. About 60 senior students and 15 university instructors giving classes in English and Chinese participated in the research. The research methodology is based on analytical and practical analyses of the normative documents facilitating the correlation of foreign language education standards in Ukraine, Europe and China; interviewing; observation (within the experimental study/training). The results show that all students and instructors admitted the importance of culture-related issues in the process of teaching and learning languages; 99% of the teaching staff and 75% of the students chose a more detailed content of culture-related issues to be taught/learnt; 80% of instructors and 78% of the students highlighted the importance of organising culture-related events. The research results show that it is crucial to accomplish a balanced integration of language and culture in the teaching process. Teachers should clearly understand what cultural information is significant and how to make efficient use of it by applying digital resources. The key issues teachers should pay attention to are the evaluation of cultural information, its accessibility and the most efficient ways to present it to students.

This article reports comparison results from studying the alignment of selected metadata models, used to manage E-Learning Materials (ELM) in the medicine and healthcare education, against the accreditation standards of the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (EACCME). The study aims to (1) illustrate the variety of application profiles developed as metadata models in that field, (2) identify the alignment of the metadata models with the criteria set by the EACCME. This study compared several application profiles, developed based on established metadata standards, using an evaluation matrix created using the accreditation criteria set by the EACCME. Further technical criteria were added to compare between the metadata models and their alignment with the new techniques used for publishing data online. Such techniques aid in the searchabililty and discovery of online content via the internet. Therefore, the use of XML and RDF technologies combined with the use of ontologies and controlled vocabulary was emphasized in the implementation of many metadata models. One limitation faced during conducting this research was the poor documentation of the methodology for designing the metadata models. Despite this, it is apparent that the EACCME criteria can work as best practices guidelines for describing the content of digital libraries with medical and healthcare content in order to be accredited later on. The study showed that the medicine and healthcare educational content requires specialized metadata models that consider having specific properties such as clinical history and expiry time of its material shown in some of the application profiles. Further research should be conducted to evaluate the completeness and conformity of applying the application profiles in digital libraries and online repositories to the standards' guidelines.

Academic staff owe a duty of fidelity to uphold institutional standards of integrity. They also have their own values and conceptions of integrity as well as personal responsibilities and commitments. The question of how academic practitioners address or reconcile conflicting values and responsibilities has been underexplored in the literature. Before we can examine effectiveness of academic integrity strategies and develop best practices, we need to examine the breadth of integrity decisions. To this end we posited the academic integrity problem as a set of seven dilemmas and presented them to post-secondary education staff (N = 80) located in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Asia. We asked the participants to recommend a solution to each dilemma. This yielded a modest sample of 498 themes across 30 categories. We expected the responses to fall on a binary scale where decisions either support the integrity or ignore it. However, the data suggests that academic integrity decisions are better suited to continuum where participants aim to reconcile personal and institutional obligations. We further argue that academic integrity decisions are predicated on personal experience and therefore pose a challenge for policy standardization and enforcement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for practice.

The paper focuses on the comparative analysis of professional competences development in public management and administration university programmes and the possibilities of implementation of international experience in Ukraine. Using the methods of comparative and system-functional analysis, synthesis and generalisation, the authors concentrate on the features of curriculums in public administration field taking into account the current realities of social development. The most common methods of training in the field of public administration and their practical focus are analysed. Particular attention is paid to the methods of problem-based learning in public administration, including case studies, case scenarios, and simulation games as part of the education gamification. The authors carried out an essential comparison of competences adopted in the European public administration training and those defined in the Ukrainian Standard of Higher Education in this area and revealed that the Ukrainian Standard lacks a pool of competencies related to the development and analysis of public policy.

Tourism is a service industry that demands well-trained professionals with internationally accredited skills including English language proficiency. Meeting such demands has been one of the foremost concerns of the ASEAN ministries of tourism and education. In collaboration with ASEAN member countries and the Australian government, Indonesian Ministry of Education and Ministry of Tourism piloted the integration of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), ASEAN Common Competency Standards for Tourism Professionals (ACCSTP), Common ASEAN Tourism Curriculum (CATC), Regional Qualifications Framework and Skills Recognition System (RQFSRS), and Indonesian Qualification Framework (IQF) into the National Curriculum (K-13) for hospitality and tourism education. Successfully trying out at hospitality and tourism colleges, the project was subsequently extended to vocational high schools. The study reported in this article investigated how the various policies were integrated by English teachers for their implementation in vocational high schools in a local Indonesian context and what outcomes and experiences resulted from this process. The article illustrates micro-level teacher agency in meeting regional, national and local policy mandates for preparing tourism and hospitality professionals for the common ASEAN job market.

Purpose: This study aims to explore ways of developing, implementing and validating a new framework and criteria for self-evaluation of programme curricula, with specific reference to the quality assurance certification process in a particular case. Design/methodology/approach: The framework is developed using a case study research methodology and implemented based on criteria extraction through the triangulation of indicators achieved from internal goals and external directives. Findings: The findings reveal that this is an improvement-led framework that can be adapted to other contexts during the quality assurance processes to facilitate periodical programme evaluations with a focus on the curriculum. Research limitations/implications: The proposed practical tool is developed for the programme evaluation process with a curricular focus during the quality assurance certification process of an interior architectural programme while enlightening the processes for the periodical self-evaluations of other institutions. The framework depends on both institution-specific internal and external directives and fulfilling curriculum-related criteria of the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance. Originality/value: Within quality assurance processes, despite external quality assurance mechanisms, there is a shortage of self-evaluation tools for internal quality assurance procedures, which allow the dissociation of programme-specific qualities. The proposed framework is developed as an example of a self-tailored internal quality assurance tool and process for educational institutions to reveal their unique qualities.

Purpose: Recognising the importance of universities in the achievement of social and global objectives, this paper aims to study the relevance of the global reporting initiative (GRI) methodology for reporting University Social Responsibility (USR) activities, taking into account the specificity of higher education institutions (HEI). Design/methodology/approach: After a review of the literature and background, the European HEI reports prepared according to the latest version of GRI standards are selected and a comparative study is carried out. The analysis focusses on comparing to what extent the standards are responding to the information needs generated in the field of higher education. Findings: General issues, common to all types of organisations, are adequately reported by HEIs, but difficulties are encountered in integrating a vision that incorporates the role of their missions in standards related to economic, social and environmental aspects. Research limitations/implications: There are few GRI reports with this format and further research is encouraged as the number of reports increase. So far, major limitations have been found by HEIs to account for their societal missions when using the GRI. Practical implications: The debates on USR are promoting an increase in the number of reports on sustainability. This paper provides some examples of the use of disclosures that can be adapted in this context, to move towards the systematisation of these practices. Originality/value: This is, to the authors' knowledge, the first comparative study on the application of GRI to sustainability reports at a European level, focussing on the adequacy between disclosures and missions.

There have been various approaches to the transmission and transformation of systems, practices, knowledge and concepts in higher education in recent decades, chief among which are drives towards indigenisation, on the one hand, and towards internationalisation, on the other. After briefly discussing and dispensing with radical versions of these, theories that reject any claim to validity or legitimacy by the rival approach, this article examines more nuanced accounts that deserve appropriately serious consideration. Thus, in the former instance, there is an emphasis on the local that nonetheless acknowledges a debt to the global, whereas conversely the emphasis on the global is seen as compatible with an acknowledgement of diversity, difference and particularity. What is gained and what is lost in these various approaches to educational transmission and transformation? After reflecting, in this regard, on lessons from both Africa and Europe -- in particular, on the debates in South Africa around Africanisation and decolonisation, and in Germany around global interdependence -- I cautiously endorse the idea of 'transculturality' (as contrasted with 'multiculturality' and 'interculturality') as a promising philosophical perspective on transmission of knowledge and practices, and as conceptualising transformation of higher education. The role of philosophy, in particular, consists in part in counteracting the hegemony of both traditional and homogenising ('colonising') authority.

This article proposes a research agenda for future inquiry into the use of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) in the plurilingual Canadian context. Drawing on data collected from a research forum hosted by the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers in 2014, as well as a detailed analysis of Canadian empirical studies and practice-based projects to date, the authors examine three areas of emphasis related to CEFR use: (a) K-12 education, including uses with learners; (b) initial teacher education, where additional language teacher candidates are situated as both learners and future teachers; and (c) postsecondary language learning contexts. Future research directions are proposed in consideration of how policymaking, language teaching and language learning are articulated across each of these three contexts. To conclude, a call is made for ongoing conversations encouraging stakeholders to consider how they might take up pan-Canadian interests when introducing various aspects of the CEFR and its related tools.

The usefulness of explicit knowledge of the second language is a matter of controversy in the field of second language acquisition. In this regard, it has been argued that explicit representations might be useful for some structures but not for others (R. Ellis, 2006; Roehr & Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2009). The goal of this study was to examine whether explicit knowledge about the Spanish subjunctive is related to using this structure accurately in discrete-point measures, as well as in measures of oral and written production. The participants were 46 learners of Spanish as a second language, who were in their fifth semester and had received explicit instruction about the subjunctive during three terms. The results show that the participants had developed somewhat low levels of explicit knowledge of the subjunctive, and that explicit knowledge of this structure was significantly correlated to its correct use in discrete-point grammar exercises and in writing, but not in speaking.

The purposes of this paper are: to assess how comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is implemented in schools in the World Health Organisation's European Region; and to investigate the evidence supporting its effectiveness. Data were collected in 2016-2017, using a validated questionnaire sent to representatives of governmental and nongovernmental institutions in 25 countries of the WHO European Region. The results demonstrated that, in nine countries, sexuality education can be classified as comprehensive; in ten countries it is non-comprehensive; in four countries there is no programme in place; and two countries were excluded from the analysis. In contrast to non-comprehensive sexuality education programmes, CSE programmes address a wider range of topics, including the social, emotional and interpersonal aspects of sexuality. Furthermore, teachers are more often trained to deliver sexuality education and participatory teaching methods are widely used. CSE programmes are more valued by pupils as a source of information on sexuality, based on national survey results. The availability of CSE programmes coincides with more effective contraceptive use and lower teenage fertility rates. However, more rigorous research is needed to establish a causal relationship between CSE and adolescent sexual and reproductive health indicators.

Education policies can be understood as discursive strategies often used to foreground political ideologies and shape pedagogic practice. This chapter focuses on the ways in which the notion of 'teaching excellence' has received a renewed focus in the context of the introduction of a Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework for higher education in England. The study adopted a hybrid approach to Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the interplay of discourses underpinning teaching excellence in the context of a policy purporting to assess the standard of teaching in higher education. Drawing on the English case, textual data comprised a White Paper and two policy announcements outlining the introduction of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework alongside 22 written submissions to the 'Assessing Quality in Higher Education' inquiry. Findings revealed four competing discourses: quality enhancement, quality assurance, widening participation and graduate employability. A disjuncture between policy claims and institutional practice was highlighted, with discursive silences regarding access, participation and employability. It is argued that the performative culture generated by such a policy inadvertently encourages institutions to focus on accountability and reputational concerns at the expense of processes which reflect the broader value of establishing teaching excellence in higher education.

This paper marks the changes that have taken place in the Senegalese higher education system. As Senegalese citizens and leaders have worked diligently to improve their economy and society as a whole, they have experienced a great deal of obstacles in moving forward. Throughout this process, education has been an important aspect to improving the economic and social development of the country. Included in this economic, social, and educational overhaul, higher education was a component that required a great deal of work. In order to contend in the global society, the higher education system needed to be reformed. This paper included a discussion of the reformation process of Senegal's higher education from the French model at the heart of its inception to the adoption of the Bologna process. This process has allowed higher education in Senegal to become better with time and grow in its success.

In this article, we discuss the process of standardization of Higher education (HE) initiated by the Bologna Process bringing to the forefront the temporal politics of the standardization of European Higher Education Arena (EHEA). Empirically, we perform a comparative review of the Scorecards indicators at the base of the Bologna Process monitoring project. We argue that the fabrication of EHEA could be seen as the installation of new time-space 'time' and 'space' appear inevitably intertwined. Instead of being a simple addition, the time space of EHEA interferes with the multiple time spaces of educational institutions and is characterized by being a network time, an unbroken and fragmented temporality sustained, enacted through, and controlled by the fluidity and the malleability of standards. They change recurrently over time, playing with different rhythms. What emerges is an overall arrhythmia that maintains the field permanently in tension. This reconfigures temporality as intrinsically manifold: as multiple and heterogeneous. Moreover, the temporal politics of standards reconfigures perception of past, present and especially future. The current state of implementation is constantly being (re)shaped in relation to the present and future performances, where's one today level of EHEA targets achievement forms the basis for improvement tomorrow. In this scenario, assessing standards and headline targets become a policy instrument for synchronizing the countries performances, by locating them in a temporal framework that encodes future-oriented dispositions.

The CDIO Initiative is a community for engineering education development, but since 2016 its annual conference also calls for research. This paper considers possible roles for CDIO in the field of engineering education research (EER). The EER landscape is explored, in particular considering whether the aim of research is to seek knowledge to improve engineering education, or to seek knowledge for its own sake? Although usefulness and scholarliness are not mutually exclusive, the priority matters throughout the research process and in evaluating work. Introducing concepts from similar debates, this paper argues for embracing the tension, to form a productive relationship between scholarliness and usefulness. A dual objective is implied: usefully contributing to the improvement of engineering education and establishing a recognised research field enabling sustainable careers for researchers. Quality mechanisms are necessary for staking out borders and upholding standards, at least to weed out work that is neither scholarly nor useful.

This article discusses the tension between quality assurance and quality enhancement in engineering education at a programme level. It acknowledges that accreditation has evolved for many years, but does not agilely support innovation or implement changes in educational programmes. Existing quality assurance systems, institutional collaboration networks, as well as new innovative quality enhancement models and processes are described, contrasted and synthesised. Quality enhancement is analysed based on its function as a source of inspiration and dissemination of good practice. The article reflects on a novel and more collaborative approach to quality enhancement, built on the foundations of specific pedagogical standards and rubrics (e.g. CDIO). One solution leading to real continuous quality enhancement could be flexible and agile evaluation processes. These are founded on measurement and rating frameworks and complemented with quality assurance for engineering education. Incremental enhancement is based on relevant needs identified collaboratively between programmes.

Educational research, and research in the Social Sciences more generally, has experienced a growth in the introduction of ethical review boards since the 1990s. Increasingly, universities have set up ethics review procedures that require researchers to submit applications seeking approval to conduct research. Review boards and the rules and conditions under which they operate have been criticised as obstructive, unnecessarily bureaucratic, and even unethical. At the same time, review boards and their procedures have been acknowledged as contributing to consideration of the ethical conduct of research. This paper explores the issues related to ethical review and examines the wider ethical considerations that may arise during the research process. The paper concludes that a purely administrative process of review is inadequate to ensure the ethical conduct of research, especially qualitative research. Rather, it is argued that ethical research entails the resolution of a potential series of ethical dilemmas as they arise during research. As such, the ethical conduct of research is a matter of researcher formation and development.

In 2015, the European Educational Research Association (EERA) initiated a study to examine education researchers' experiences with and attitudes towards research ethics reviews. This paper is not a result of this study; nevertheless, it is related to it while critically reflecting upon the issue of research ethics reviews. It starts with an analysis of observations and comments provided by the interviewees in their questionnaire replies. In them, some key dilemmas can be identified, which have been discussed in various academic circles in recent decades. The main part of the paper is intended to review these discussions and to determine their relevance for the debate in the specific field of education research. In the conclusion, attention is drawn to a gradual shift from the sphere of legitimacy to the sphere of legality, resulting from the current attempts of regulating research ethics, while pointing to a potential conflict between the two key research principles, which are also key academic values: ethical conduct in research and academic freedom.

Since the 2000s there has been a growing global interest in policies that redefine, support, and monitor school leadership roles. Despite this, research knowledge on the international use of school leadership standards is limited, specifically on its relationship to various role demands (or imperatives) of school administration. Drawing from data from the International Project on Effective School Leadership Policies and Teaching and Learning International Survey, we performed a descriptive analysis of leadership standards through the lens of the four imperatives of school administration, i.e. managerial, instructional, moral, and socio-political. The findings indicate that the seemingly unified emerging global phenomenon of standards policy for school leaders is more diverse than frequently argued with the focus on various imperatives. At the same time they reveal a broad consensus among countries promoting standards on managerial aspects as well as isomorphism and detachment of policy from practice in several contexts. The study expands the knowledge base on the international adoption of the school leadership standards policy and its interrelations with the imperatives of school administration.

Introduction: Competency-based approaches have been developed in health promotion over the past four decades but, to date, there has been limited focus on the evaluation of their use and impact. In 2016, 5 years after publication of the CompHP Core Competencies Framework for Health Promotion, an evaluation of their use and impact across the health promotion community in Europe was initiated. As a first step in this process, a scoping review of the literature was undertaken which aimed to explore the current status of health promotion competencies, with a particular focus on developments in Europe and ascertain what evidence exists about the use and impact of health promotion competencies on practice, education, and training. Method: Searches of the electronic databases and gray literature were conducted between February 2016 and December 2017. The searches were limited to sources published in English between 2009 and 2017, which focused on health promotion competencies. Results: A total of 39 sources were identified for in-depth analysis, of which 26 were theoretical papers and 13 were papers reporting on empirical studies. Many of the sources presented health promotion competency frameworks or described their development. Some examples of the use of health promotion competencies were found but only two instances of their evaluation were identified. Conclusions: The review found few empirical studies on the implementation and use of health promotion competencies and highlights a lack of evaluation studies on their impact on practice, education, and training.

This paper addresses three central themes that run through the contributions to this special issue. The first of these is what it argues to be an inescapable connection between research and what might in some sense be regarded as the pursuit of truth, or at least of beliefs that are more deserving of belief and our confidence than others. Even forms of research like ethnography and phenomenography, those for which the pursuit of justice is the primary concern and those that seek to deconstruct the texts and discourses promoted by others -- all rest on forms of inquiry driven in one way or another by this same commitment. The second theme is the relationship between research and discipline where discipline is seen as the set of rules and principles that serve to make a community of arguers possible, but also to support the processes that thought and experience indicate provide the best assurance of opinions deserving our belief. And since there is clearly available to us in the academy and elsewhere more than one way of providing such assurance, each with some distinctive logical and procedural features, we need to consider the disciplines that might serve such purpose, not just the generic principle of discipline. Finally, the paper engages with the terrain of 'alternative epistemologies' -- terrain rendered more complex because, as described here, the term seems to encompass some rather different claims of a more or less problematic nature.

The article proves that the influence of integration processes of the growth of the role of globalization requires the necessity of using and adapting international educational standards and criteria of assessing the quality in the field of national education. It is noted that contemporary European practice involves the development of culture of quality through the introduction of quality management. The emphasis is placed on the fact that in the conditions of the transformation of the socio-political system, the formation of a civil society and market relations in the process of entering our country into a single educational European space, the search for ways to ensure the quality of higher education and the creation of mechanisms for its management are updated. It is investigated that the complexity of creating quality management mechanisms is not only to coordinate the development of the concept at all levels of state government, but also to coordinate the views of various government institutions. It is emphasized that adaptation is considered as a two-way interdependent process of adapting education (institutions that teach) to the student's personality, as well as his active inclusion in the design of an adaptive informational-and-educational environment and the development of individual educational routes. It has been found out that the main tools for determining the quality are internal and external evaluation. It is emphasized that the mechanism of quality management, in addition to assessing the provision of educational services, i.e. the process of teaching itself, focuses on the effectiveness of the functioning of higher education, i.e. the assessment of a specialist's professional training. The necessity of participation of stakeholders (employers) in the system of management of quality of higher pedagogical education is emphasized.

The vast majority of studies concerning the implementation of quality assurance in higher education institutions have been conducted from a national perspective, with few cross-national studies. This study aimed to explore the implementation of quality assurance standards in Europe from a comparative perspective. A questionnaire based on "Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area" was developed to compare countries. The results indicate that higher education institutions mainly formulate their quality assurance systems according to national standards or based on their own needs. The main emphasis in quality assurance is on teaching and learning activities and curriculum development. The major contribution of the study lies in showing how different country settings affect the implementation of quality assurance standards through presenting the strengths and weaknesses for quality assurance implementation among several European countries.

This paper investigates the impact of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) on the way English language teaching (ELT) is currently understood and practised in Malaysia. It presents a critical discourse analysis of newspaper texts in order to show how CEFR represents a form of Western-imposed globalisation that conflicts with local cultures and values. We argue that the newspapers construct a dominant discourse that promotes a vision of society that accords with CEFR-ELT implementation. Our aim is to contribute to the development of a counter-discourse that challenges the broader world-view underpinning ELT.

The Bologna Process is the newest of a chain of activities stimulated by supra-national actors since the 1950s to challenge national borders in higher education in Europe. Now, the ministers in charge of higher education of the individual European countries agreed to promote a similar cycle-structure of study programmes and programmes based on the strategic aim to enhance student mobility in two directions: to increase the attractiveness for students from other parts of the world to study--primarily for the whole study programme--in European countries and to facilitate intra-European--primarily temporary--mobility. Studies aiming at establishing the results of this policy face various problems. Statistics move only gradually from "foreign" to "mobile" students, but remain insufficient with respect to temporary mobility. Individual European countries opt for so varied solutions that an overall overview is hardly feasible. Yet, some general trends are visible. First, Bologna contributed to increased inwards mobility of students from other parts of the world, but not to a more rapid increase of intra-European student mobility. Second, the event of outwards mobility during the course of study up to graduation has turned out to be more frequent than expected by many experts, but differences by country do not fade away. Third, the value of student mobility gradually declines as a consequence of gradual loss of exclusiveness.

We describe an exploratory study carried out within the University of Milan, Department of English the aim of which was to analyse features of the spoken English of first-year Modern Languages undergraduates. We compiled a learner corpus, the "Role Play" corpus, which consisted of 69 role-play interactions in English carried out by first-year students at B1+ -B2 levels according to the "Common European Framework of Reference". The analysis focused on the students' use of two features of spoken English grammar, tails and the discourse markers "yes" and "yeah". Instances of these features from the data were compared with examples of British native speaker, learner and Italian native speaker usage. Preliminary findings pointed to the role of the students' first language, L2 proficiency and specific task features in the range and frequency of these phenomena as well as in the functions they deployed in the spoken discourse of the informants.