The goal of this work is to better understand the institutional changes in the educational systems of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. We demonstrate that the educational reforms implemented during the transformation introduced very different institutional arrangements in the four countries, despite the fact that their systems…

Reporting standards and critical appraisal tools serve as beacons for researchers, reviewers, and research consumers. Parallel to existing guidelines for researchers to report and evaluate group-comparison studies, single-case experimental (SCE) researchers are in need of guidelines for reporting and evaluating SCE studies. A systematic search was…

Crowdsourcing is an emerging research area that has experienced rapid growth in the past few years. Although crowdsourcing has demonstrated its potential in numerous domains, several key challenges continue to hinder its application. One of the major challenges is quality control. How can crowdsourcing requesters effectively control the quality…

We examined 480 dissertations on the use of technology in mathematics education and developed a Quality Framework (QF) that provided structure to consistently define and measure quality. Dissertation studies earned an average of 64.4% of the possible quality points across all methodology types, compared to studies in journals that averaged 47.2%.…

This study is a comparison of the descriptive tagging practices among library, archive, and museum professionals using an inter-indexing consistency approach. The first purpose of this study was to determine the extent of the similarities and differences among professional groups when assigning descriptive tags to a wide variety of objects that…

Background: Research has documented the importance of high-quality early childhood experiences in preparing children for school. Quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) have recently emerged in many states as a way to build quality of child care and to promote better child outcomes. Objective: The goal of this study was to determine if…

To enhance their competitive advantage in the marketplace, many business leaders develop market orientation strategies designed to increase customer engagement. These market orientation strategies include improvement in service delivery, relationship management, customer satisfaction, and quality control methods. There is a lack of understanding…

Enormous distances across the vast South Pacific hinder student access to the main Fiji campus of the regional tertiary education provider, the University of the South Pacific (USP). Fortunately, USP has been a pioneer in distance education (DE) and promotes multi-modal delivery of programmes. Geography has embraced DE, but doubts remain about…

Purpose: This paper sets out to report on a research project investigating the academic voice in higher education quality in the UK and the Czech Republic. It aims to describe the origins and reasons for introducing quality monitoring and assurance into higher education, showing the differences and impacts on higher education quality in England…

Documents produced by international organizations attached to the United Nations sometimes create problems in their great variety of publication practices, but most have the objectives of producing information for use internationally, of improving standards and methods, and of making statistics more comparable. Generally, information is obtained…

Two procedures for systematic organizational quality assessment are presented: (1) a distributional assessment to monitor individual, group, or unit performance by establishing real and maximum-feasibility parameters; and (2) a cost-assessment system based on utility analysis, to assign dollar values and benefits to quality interventions targeting…

We compare three control charts for monitoring data from student evaluations of teaching (SET) with the goal of improving student satisfaction with teaching performance. The two charts that we propose are a modified "p" chart and a z-score chart. We show that these charts overcome some of the shortcomings of the more traditional charts…

In an effort to encourage cost-conscious behavior and quality assurance, students in community medicine clerkships at the Medical College of Ohio were required to conduct retrospective reviews of their peers' laboratory usage patterns using information generated by these peers during internal medicine and pediatrics rotations. (Author/JMD)

The type, number, and scope of errors on Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (BEOG) program applications were estimated in a replication of a 1976-1977 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Comparison Study. Information reported on BEOG applicants and IRS income tax returns was compared for various categories of applicants. The study provides information…

The Anchor Test Study (ATS) provides a method for translating a pupil's score on any one of eight widely used standardized reading tests for Grades 4, 5, and 6 to a corresponding score on any of the other seven tests, as well as furnishing new nationally representative norms for each of the eight tests. In addition, the Study presents new…