scholarly journals Assessing University and Programme Experiences: Towards an Integrated Asia Pacific Approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Kutszik Fryer ◽  
Lily Min Zeng ◽  
Yue Zhao

Effective assessment of university experiences is critical for quality assurance/enhancement but fragmented across the Pacific-Asian universities. A shared conceptual and measurement foundation for understanding student experiences is a necessary first step for inter-institutional communication across the region. The current study is a first step toward such a foundation, uniting two of the most internationally and locally prominent instruments: Chinese College Student Survey (university engagement; Mainland China) and Student Learning Experience Questionnaire (programme engagement; Hong Kong). The survey was completed by students from one research-intensive Hong Kong university (n = 539). Random, split-half CFA, latent-reliability, pair-wise correlations, ANOVA (gender) and MANOVA (faculty) were conducted. Factor-structure (good CFA fit for the test/retest) and scale reliability (0.07 > Raykov’s Rho) suggested a robust, short (63-items) survey resulted. Intra-/inter-survey relationships were consistent with the existing Student Engagement and Student Approaches to Learning theory. ANOVA indicated small differences for gender for a few latent constructs, but MANOVA revealed substantial differences across the 10 faculties. This study resulted in a robust Pacific-Asian intra-/inter-institutional student experience instrument which brings together two equally important perspectives on the student experience. This comprehensive student engagement instrument stands ready for cross-national and longitudinal tests. The new instrument’s benefits extend to theoretical connections to student experience assessment in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom enabling international connections to be made.

Author(s):  
Ke Jiang ◽  
George A. Barnett ◽  
Laramie D. Taylor ◽  
Bo Feng

This chapter employs semantic network analysis to investigate the online database LexisNexis to study the dynamic co-evolutions of peace frames embedded in the news coverage from the Associated Press (AP--United States), Xinhua News Agency (XH--Mainland China), and South China Morning Post (SCMP—Hong Kong). From 1995 to 2014, while the war and harmony frames were relatively stable in AP and XH respectively, there was a trend toward convergence of the use of war frames between AP and XH. The convergence of semantic networks of coverage of peace in AP and XH may have left more room for SCPM to develop a unique peace frame, and the divergence of semantic networks of coverage of peace in AP and XH may lead SCPM to develop strategies of balancing the frames employed by AP and XH, thus creating a hybrid peace frame.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-233
Author(s):  
Ray C. H. Leung

Abstract This study of media discourse focuses on how the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is conceptualized by the English-speaking press. To this end, the present research studies newspaper articles on the Hong Kong Occupy Central Movement published in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Cultural Linguistics, combined with corpus analytical techniques, is used to examine the construals of hong kong and mainland china. A 303,455-word corpus which contains 402 articles was compiled for data analysis. It is found that the disagreement between the Hong Kong civilians and the Mainland Chinese government is often reported with metonymical conceptualizations (place for inhabitants versus place for the institution). In general, the sociopolitical culture in Hong Kong and Mainland China is imbued with negative emotions, disharmony, and power differences, as is evident from the body, illness, disease, container, and possession conceptualizations. At the end of this paper, issues about researching conceptualizations in newspaper texts, such as the journalistic input, are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-149
Author(s):  
Pui-Tak Lee (李培德)

The year 1949 was a great divide in modern Chinese history. How Shanghai bankers responded to it is an interesting question to address. For those bankers who chose to leave Shanghai and settle in British Hong Kong, can we suppose they were permanently separated from China or Taiwan? It is generally assumed that once the Shanghai bankers confined themselves to their new home in Hong Kong or moved on to other locations in the United States or elsewhere, they immediately severed all ties with either mainland China under the ccp (Chinese Communist Party) or Taiwan under the kmt (Kuomintang or Guomindang). Such an assumption leads to a mistaken argument that the departure of Chinese bankers from Shanghai cut short their involvements in China politics. Perhaps it is true that some emigrant bankers never returned, but others remained in touch with their home in China, whether because they were solicited by the agents who were sent to the colony by the ccp in China and the kmt in Taiwan, or, because they took the initiative in reaching across the borders to mainland China or Taiwan. From their sanctuary in Hong Kong, how did the bankers conduct cross-border relations after 1949? This paper will go beyond the general assumption that the Shanghai bankers turned to Hong Kong solely for the colony’s being a sanctuary during the political and economic turmoil of the 1940s. Instead, these bankers continued to engage in political confrontation to the ccp and the kmt after they fled Shanghai. This paper argues that once they were in the colony, they had to address several problems. These included, first, to choose their final destination in either Shanghai, Hong Kong or Taipei; second, whether to continue or quit their banking careers and thirdly, to find a solution in order to counteract the alignment with either the ccp or the kmt. 1949年是中國近代史的分水嶺,上海銀行家對面對動盪不安的局勢會作出怎樣的回應,是一個很值得討論的問題。一旦銀行家選擇離開上海,轉移到英屬香港,他們就可完全脫離國共內戰的地理範疇──中國大陸或臺灣嗎?一般的研究無不認為已從香港轉移到香港的上海銀行家,目的為遠離包括在大陸執政的中國共產黨或撤退至臺灣的國民黨。本文指出,這樣的設想是對當時處於動盪政治經濟局勢的上海銀行家的錯誤理解。事實上,當時是有一部份從上海撤離的銀行家並不願意再被捲入政治,但是有更多已在境外的銀行家,透過自己在國共兩黨的代表,與中國大陸或臺灣保持緊密之聯繫,也有許多銀行家是主動地發展出跨境的管道來維持與中國大陸或臺灣的關係。值得探討的是,1949年之後,這些以英屬香港為基地的跨境聯繫是如何運作的呢? 本文探討1940年代末在中國變動的政治與經濟局勢下,香港不僅為離開上海的銀行家提供一個安全的庇護所,同時更是這些銀行家在離開上海後繼續面對中國共產黨和國民黨,進行各種活動的最重要境外基地。本文指出這些上海銀行家在移居香港之際所要面對的諸多問題。首先,如何在上海、香港和臺北三地之間作出選擇,哪裏是他們最佳的落腳處?其次,是否要繼續和如何維持銀行的業務?最後,應如何因應中國共產黨和中國國民黨向他們的統戰而作出適當的反應? (This article is in English).


Author(s):  
Phil Race

We live and work in challenging times. Now that it seems certain (post Browne, 2010) that the fees students pay for their higher education experience will double (or worse), we can't be surprised that the emphasis on 'the student experience' of higher education will intensify. Whether students are saddling themselves with ever-increasing amounts of debt to afford that higher education experience, or whether it is parents who foot the bill, the spotlight continues to focus ever more sharply on student satisfaction, alongside all available measures of the quality of student engagement in higher education. We already have league tables in which the reflection of the student experience as gained from the National Student Survey features prominently. And with diminishing budgets for teaching, class sizes are likely to continue to grow - in those disciplines where higher education survives least scathed. So how can we meet the challenge of 'getting students engaged'?


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 592-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming-Te Wang ◽  
Jennifer Fredricks ◽  
Feifei Ye ◽  
Tara Hofkens ◽  
Jacqueline Schall Linn

Abstract. Increasing school engagement is critical for improving academic achievement and reducing dropout rates. In order to increase student engagement and identify those students who are most disengaged from school, we need to conceptualize and measure student engagement appropriately. This study used a mixed method sequential exploratory design to develop and validate a student survey measure of school engagement that reflects a multidimensional conceptualization of engagement. Psychometric tests were conducted with a large racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 5th–12th graders in the United States ( N = 3,632). Findings demonstrated that a bifactor multidimensional model fit the data appropriately and provided evidence of measurement invariance, construct, and predictive validity. Results provided a psychometrically sound foundation for capturing the behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and social aspects of student engagement and disengagement in school.


Author(s):  
Chong Ho Yu ◽  
Samuel A. DiGangi ◽  
Angel Jannasch-Pennell

The objective of this case study is to illustrate how text mining of open-ended responses from a student survey could yield valuable information for improving student experience management (SEM). The concept of student SEM was borrowed from the notion of customer experience management (CEM), which aims for ongoing improvement of customer relations through understanding of the customer’s point of view (Pine & Gilmore 1998). With the advance of text mining technology, textual data that were previously underutilized are found to be valuable in CEM. To illustrate how text mining can be applied to SEM, we discuss an example from a campus-wide survey conducted at Arizona State University. The purpose of this survey was to better understand student experiences with instructional technology in order for administrators to make data-driven decisions on its implementation. Rather than imposing the researchers’ preconceived suppositions on the students by using force-option survey items, researchers on this project chose to use open-ended questions in order to elicit a free emergence of themes from the students. The most valuable lesson learned from this study is that students perceive an ideal environment as a web of mutually supporting systems. Specifically, online access should be augmented by use of laptops and availability of course materials, whereas virtual classes should be balanced by human interactions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
WEIJIE HOU ◽  
BAISHENG CUI ◽  
YUPING SONG ◽  
YING CHEN

Along with the international trade and economic ties, international stock markets are performing increasingly closely. This paper investigates the volatilities and the return co-movements among three stock markets in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States, from January 1, 2007, to July 5, 2019. We use the MIDAS framework to separately characterize short-term and long-term features. The results reveal that different market volatilities have different sensitivities to the same events. After the second half of 2016, the volatility of China’s stock market gradually dropped below that of the other two markets. As for market co-movements, the return correlation between China and Hong Kong rose sharply after 2007. Although the co-movements for return rates among these three stock markets possess mutual dynamic synchronization features, deviations exist occasionally due to the emotional transfer of funds in the international market when a significant economic or financial event occurs. The analysis suggests that countries should stabilize the financial investment environment and guard against hot money activities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylie E. C. Ainslie ◽  
Caroline E. Walters ◽  
Han Fu ◽  
Sangeeta Bhatia ◽  
Haowei Wang ◽  
...  

Background: The COVID-19 epidemic was declared a Global Pandemic by WHO on 11 March 2020. By 24 March 2020, over 440,000 cases and almost 20,000 deaths had been reported worldwide. In response to the fast-growing epidemic, which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei, China imposed strict social distancing in Wuhan on 23 January 2020 followed closely by similar measures in other provinces. These interventions have impacted economic productivity in China, and the ability of the Chinese economy to resume without restarting the epidemic was not clear. Methods: Using daily reported cases from mainland China and Hong Kong SAR, we estimated transmissibility over time and compared it to daily within-city movement, as a proxy for economic activity. Results: Initially, within-city movement and transmission were very strongly correlated in the five mainland provinces most affected by the epidemic and Beijing. However, that correlation decreased rapidly after the initial sharp fall in transmissibility. In general, towards the end of the study period, the correlation was no longer apparent, despite substantial increases in within-city movement. A similar analysis for Hong Kong shows that intermediate levels of local activity were maintained while avoiding a large outbreak. At the very end of the study period, when China began to experience the re-introduction of a small number of cases from Europe and the United States, there is an apparent up-tick in transmission. Conclusions: Although these results do not preclude future substantial increases in incidence, they suggest that after very intense social distancing (which resulted in containment), China successfully exited its lockdown to some degree. Elsewhere, movement data are being used as proxies for economic activity to assess the impact of interventions. The results presented here illustrate how the eventual decorrelation between transmission and movement is likely a key feature of successful COVID-19 exit strategies.


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