SRHE Blog

The Society for Research into Higher Education

Category Archives: Research


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Doing Discourse Analysis

By Geraldine Murphy

I was lucky enough to grab a place on the SRHE Discourse Analysis workshop on the 24th of March in London. This session was facilitated by the very experienced @karensmith_HE and covered a range of approaches to undertaking Discourse Analysis within research across a variety of disciplines. The workshop was aimed at researchers at all levels of experience/confidence and at various stages within their projects. The mix of projects, levels and experiences of the delegates made for rich discussion around the best uses and applications of the approach including when to use….and when not to! Continue reading →

Ian Mc Nay


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Ian McNay writes…

By Ian McNay

How many Eleanors can you name? Roosevelt, Marx, Bron, Aquitaine, Rigby…add your own. Why am I asking this? Because it is a new metric for widening access. The recent issue of People Management, the journal of CIPD, reports that in 2014 the University of Oxford admitted more girls named Eleanor than students who had received free school meals. Those who were taught at private schools were 55% more likely to go to Oxbridge than student who received free school meals. Those two universities have even reduced the proportion of students they admitted who came from lower socio-economic groups in the decade from 2004=5, from 13.3% to 10% at Oxford and from 12.4% to 10.2% at Cambridge. Other Russell Group universities also recorded a fall, according to HESA data. So, second question: how many people do you know who have had free school meals or whose children have had? Not a visible/audible characteristic: they do not wear wristlet identifiers. But your university planning office will have the stats if you want to check its record. Continue reading →


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Special Issues of Studies in Higher Education

Mary-Louise Kearney

Mary-Louise Kearney

Dan Lincoln

Dan Lincoln

The intention of Special Issues is to tackle questions –the thornier the better -arising from the global Higher Education agenda (as defined by both policy-makers and researchers).  Priority domains include governance and leadership, R&D and innovation management, the academic profession, the changing demographics  of international students, financing, innovative approaches to teaching and learning and the concerns of specific groups such as students, women graduates and the challenges faced by certain regions and national contexts due to socio-economic change or the instance of disruptive  social conflict.These areas and topics of interest are then shaped into working titles, which provide the specific orientation of each issue.

We are calling this the Global Agenda because Tertiary/Higher Education has long been a key part of the global  economy and  all countries are facing similar challenges to ensure that they are performing with optimal competitiveness in this fast-moving environment. When a nation fails to keep pace with this situation, this is extremely detrimental to the social and equitable advancement of its citizens.

The process from the negotiation of a priority topic or area to the actual Special Issue title aims to ensure that the focus is both current and forward-looking in order to generate maximum interest and readership.

Authors are typically recruited via: Continue reading →

Ian Mc Nay


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The REF: Digging beyond the headlines

By Ian McNay

Recent headlines on the Research Excellence Framework (REF) were  a bit over the top when the scores are scrutinised closely, particularly in Education, as detailed in my earlier blog post back in February. So, I won’t take long, but want to add to what I said then to emphasise the impact of the three elements of scoring and the discontinuities between exercises. Andrew Pollard, chair of the Education panel, concentrates on ‘research activity’ in his comment on the BERA website, where 30 percent was at 4* level. However, output had only 21.7 per cent at that level; the scores were boosted by scores of over 40 per cent for impact and environment.

If you look hard you can find a breakdown of scores by element for 2008, and these show how things have changed. For environment, in 2008, 5 units scored 50 per cent or higher at 4*, with a top score of 75 per cent; 19 scored 50 per cent or more when 3* and 4* are combined. This time, at 4* 18 units scored 50 per cent or more and 8 scored 100 per cent. Combining 3* and 4* shows that 52 units scored more than 50 per cent with 23 scoring 100 per cent across those top two levels.  That grade inflation suggests either considerable investment for development or less demanding criteria.

On impact there is no precedent. In 2008 the third element was esteem indicators, where the top score for 4* was 40 per cent, by only two units, with a further 10 getting 30 per cent. For impact in 2014, 13 units scored more than 50 per cent – well above the highest score for esteem. Perhaps we judged our peer academics more harshly than users of research did. Or, perhaps, they were less obsessed with long term, large scale, statistical studies using big data sets which successive panels have set as the acme of quality work, and more concerned with ’did it make a difference?’ Continue reading →

Charlotte Mathieson


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A Culture of Publish or Perish? The Impact of the REF on Early Career Researchers

By Charlotte Mathieson

This article aims to highlight some of the ways in which the REF has impacted upon early career researchers, using this as a spring-broad to think about how the next REF might better accommodate this career group.

In my role at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick I work closely with a community of early career researchers and have experienced first-hand the many impacts that this REF has had on my peer group; but I wanted to ensure that this talk reflected a broader range of experiences across UK HE, and therefore in preparation I distributed an online survey asking ECRs about their experiences and opinions on the REF 2014.

Survey overview

– 193 responses collected between December 2014 and March 2015
– responses gathered via social media and email from across the UK
– 81.3 % had completed PhDs within the last 8 years
– 41.5 % were REF returned
– 18.7% were currently PhD students
– 10.9% had left academia since completing a PhD

5 main points emerged as most significant from among the responses: Continue reading →

Ian Kinchin


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Research-teaching links: what do students think?

By Ian Kinchin

Looking at university web sites, it is clear that many institutions are offering “unique” student experiences for identical reasons. In particular a research-informed teaching and learning environment. The convergence on this particular selling point is quite striking despite the lack of clarity on what this means or what the evidence is for this being the best way forward. It seems that universities are all heading along the same road without questioning whether there are alternative perspectives.

I find the comments made nearly 50 years ago by West (1966: 767) particularly interesting in this regard, suggesting an alternative model for university teaching. He states:

“Most teachers understand the importance of developing the students’ capacity for critical thinking and self-education, but most of us are too busy telling them what we know to get around to showing them how we learn. Possibly they would gain more from watching us learn than from watching us teach.”

Imagine a university without a “teaching curriculum”, but a “learning curriculum” in which the students study the activities of particular researchers in order to piece together the nature of their chosen subject. Continue reading →

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Was that a foul REF?

By Rob Cuthbert

The Research Excellence Framework, the UK’s latest version of research quality assessment, reached its conclusion just after the SRHE Research Conference. Publication of the results in mid-December led to exhaustive coverage in all the HE media. 

In the Research Season 2008-2014 the controversy was not so much about who ended up top of the league, but whether the English premier league can still claim to be the best in the world.

Big clubs were even more dominant, with the golden triangle pulling away from the rest and filling the top league positions. But controversy raged about the standard of refereeing, with many more players being labelled world class than ever before. Referees supremo David Sweeney was quick to claim outstanding success, but sponsors and commentators were more sceptical, as the number of goals per game went up by more than 50%.

During the season transfer fees had reached record heights as galactico research stars were poached by the big clubs before the end of the transfer window. To secure their World University League places the leading clubs were leaving nothing to chance. It was a league of two halves. After positions based on research outcomes had been calculated there was a series of adjustments, based on how many people watched the game (impact), and how big your stadium was (environment). This was enough to ensure no surprises in the final league table, with big clubs exploiting their ground advantage to the full. And of course after the end of the season there is usually a further adjustment to ensure that the big clubs get an even bigger share of the funding available. This process, decreed by the game’s governing body, is known as ‘financial fair play’.

Some players had an outstanding season – astronomers were reported to be ‘over the moon’ at the final results, but not everyone was happy: one zoologist confided that he was ‘sick as a parrot’. The small clubs lacked nothing in effort, especially at Northampton, where they responded superbly to their manager’s call to put in 107%. But not everyone can be a winner, research is a results business and as always when a team underperforms, some clubs will be quick to sack the manager, and many more will sack the players.

Scepticism about the quality of the league lingers among the game’s governing body, suspicious about high scoring, and there is a risk that the money from the Treasury will finally dry up. The game may not have finished yet, but some … some people are running onto the pitch, they think it’s all over. It is for now.

Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England, Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com, Editor, Higher Education Review www.highereducationreview.com, and Chair, Improving Dispute Resolution Advisory Service www.idras.ac.uk

Camille Kandiko


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International research on the student experience: Power, methodologies and translation

By Camille Kandiko Howson

The SRHE Student Experience Network featured a discussion at the 2014 SRHE Conference exploring international dimensions of student experience research. We featured three international speakers to provide examples of topics and challenges faced when conducting international and comparative research:

  • Madeleine Kapinga Mutatayi , from Congo DRC, Kinshasa, Phd student Department of Educational Sciences Center for Instructional Psychology and Technology at KU Leuven, Belgium
  • Dr Johanna Annala, Senior Lecturer, School of Education, University of Tampere, Finland
  • Dr Rebecca Schendel, Lecturer, Institute of Education, UCL, UK

The event was chaired by Student Experience Network co-convenor Camille Kandiko Howson with co-convenor Matthew Cheeseman in spiritu.

The Student Experience is growing in importance around the world (Barber 2013), whilst at the same time decreasing in common understanding, shared definitions and research coherence. This may be due to variety of foci of research into the student experience, including:

  • Curricular (learning gains, assessments, breadth and depth) (Douglass et al 2012; Crosling et al 2008)
  • Co-curricular (additional opportunities, such as community engagement, study abroad, and industry collaboration and employability) (Mourshed et al 2012)
  • Extra-curricular (accommodation, lifestyle, sports, societies, politics) (Thomas 2012; UNITE 2014)

These levels are then further compounded by levels of analysis, including individual, group (such as minority groups and international students), institutional (on topics such as governance, engagement and satisfaction), and inter/national (such as access, progression, labour market and rankings). Following the paradox of globalisation, and as countries around the world position higher education in society (such as dropping tuition fees in Germany and dramatically increasing them in the UK), what key issues about the student experience are of relevance across higher education research, beyond national politics and policies?

Two questions were used to stimulate topics for discussion:

  •  What research questions are not being asked about the student experience?
  • What research and evidence could promote productive, effective educational models of higher education?

Across national contexts, the importance of measuring and researching learning strongly emerged. Several delegates raised troublesome issues when Western views of educational research and practice were used in other contexts. This encompassed staff and student perceptions of the learning environment and their relationship to each other, in terms of culturally-bound classroom and research practices. This highlighted power issues between staff and students, particularly the notion of students publically challenging or critiquing staff, even in confidential research settings. A fundamental question arose about different national and cultural interpretations of the concept of student voice, and the need for more comparative work about what student voice means in practice in different political contexts, inside and outside of the university setting.

The challenges of borrowing, or imposing, Western views were also discussed in relation to methodologies, particularly the use of large-scale surveys. The US-based National Survey of Student Engagement offered both the opportunity for comparative research of student engagement and student learning using a validated tool but researchers noted that many of the underlying theories are culturally-bound, such as ‘ideal’ forms of engagement between staff and students and notions of democratic participation, particularly in non-Democratic settings. From East Asia to Africa to the Middle East, different perspectives and modes of interaction were discussed. Related methodological issues were challenges in translating English-based research resources into other languages and cultural settings.

A useful framework picked up from conference presentations was that of using ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘powerful understanding’ when crossing borders, using international methods and tools and in partnering with colleagues.

This seminar concluded with a desire to share opportunities for collaboration and participation in exploring these areas of research. This entry is a start to this endeavour, welcoming comments and proposals for projects that could carried out in multiple national contexts and engage the international higher education research community. So please comment, share and get in touch with one another!

Dr Camille Kandiko Howson is a research fellow at King’s College London and co-editor of The Global Student Experience: An International and Comparative Analysis. 

Barber, M., Donnelly, K., and Rizvi, S. (2013) An Avalanche is coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead, London: Institute for Public Policy Research

Crosling, G., Thomas, L. and Heaney, M. (2008) Improving Student Retention in Higher Education- The role of teaching and learning, London: Routledge

Douglass, J. A., Thomson, G., & Zhao, C. M. (2012). The learning outcomes race: the value of self-reported gains in large research universities. Higher Education, 64(3), 317-335.

Staddon, E., & Standish, P. (2012). Improving the student experience. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 46(4), 631–648.

Mourshed, M., Farrell, D. And Barton, D. (2012) Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works, Washington, DC: McKinsey Center for Government

Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in Higher Education at a time of change: a summary of findings and recommendations from the What Works? Student Retention & Success programme, London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation

UNITE (2014) Living and Learning in 2034- A higher education futures project, University Alliance and UNITE.

Julie Bounford UEA


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It’s about the (academic) community, stupid!

By Julie Bounford

This blog first appeared on 23 February 2014 on Julie Bounford’s personal blog at http://jebounford.net/its-about-the-academic-community-stupid/

I recently had a conversation about my doctoral research with an acquaintance I met at a dinner dance who asked, ‘what are you doing it in, what are you doing it for?’ Not an unreasonable question. I began my reply by saying that it was in the sociology of education and whilst I was conjuring up an answer to the latter question (it changes from day to day), they retorted in a jocular fashion, ‘the sociology of vegetation? You’re researching vegetables?’ The acquaintance laughed, a little uneasily. Perhaps they had misheard me.

My sense of humour is reasonably well honed but at that particular moment I was not in a frame of mind to see the joke; on them or on me. Continue reading →

Ian Mc Nay


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Lies, damned lies and spin; never mind the statistics

By Ian McNay

Press reports, 31 January, on UCAS statistics on the 15 January deadline showed remarkable unanimity around telling, shall we say…not the whole truth:

–         Girls lead the way as degree applications hit record levels – Times

–         Record numbers of 18-year-olds apply to university – Telegraph

–         University applications hit record high – Guardian

The Telegraph had a second story claiming the number of applicants aged 20 and over had increased by 5%.

All this gave comfort to [English] ministers who claim that high fees have had no long term effect on applications. So, let us look at the longer term and compare the cycle for 2014 entry Continue reading →