Congruity and contradiction: student and institutional perspectives of learning and quality in higher education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to examine graduate student learning experiences and perceptions of quality and the extent to which these learners were living the intended experiences that academic programs are seeking to foster. Design/methodology/approach Using a multiple case-study design, a three-stage interview protocol used with six PhD candidates across three faculties as well as 25 institutional, provincial and national documents served as principal sources of data. A within-case analysis was performed for each case and compared via a cross-case analysis. Findings The four principal factors that characterized the PhD candidate learning experience emerged as the significance of intentional individualized guidance; the importance of social interactions and community; becoming an independent scholar; and the transformative nature of learning. Gaps were identified between institutional intent and the learner experience. Recommendations are made regarding the adoption of indicators of quality that focus on student learning and notions of transformation. Originality/value This investigation attempts to tell distinct and shared stories of the highly contextualized and complex phenomenon of quality in PhD student learning. With limited information regarding how programmatic development is lived by students, this study’s comparison of institutional characterizations and student perceptions of quality sheds light on existing strengths to leverage, and gaps to invest in, at the institutional and program levels.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it