This thesis is concerned with understanding the nature and impact of strategic management education upon management behaviour and performance. Previous research findings are limited, with continuing research being proposed. The aim of this research is to fill respective gaps. The research is carried out in the German machinery and equipment industry sector. This sector was selected because it is of strategic importance for Germany’s economy and it is faced with imminent and ongoing challenges. The research concentrates on small and medium sized companies as these companies dominate this sector. The desk research consists of a comprehensive literature review on the subjects: strategic management, SME community and research sector, previous empirical research results and management education. The field research adopts a quantitative methodology with a survey questionnaire in a cross sectional time horizon. The field research is complemented by six “micro case studies” using qualitative data from the questionnaire and publicly available information. Findings suggest that management education and, in particular, strategic management does not play an important role in German universities. Engineering faculties generally neglect strategic management education in their curricula. Evidence suggests that executives with engineering background have less knowledge in strategic management and generate a lower return on sales than those with business economic background or MBA qualified. From the research findings it can be concluded that German SMEs in the machinery and equipment sector profit from the implementation of strategic management. This thesis closes with recommendations to policy makers regarding management education in Germany and proposals for further research.

This inter-disciplinary study develops a group level approach to learning design and practice in the classroom. This is supported by the use of technology to support learners in their collaborative development of questions. General use of these technologies has tended to focus on tutors setting questions and students responding. This thesis explores a more sophisticated view of these technologies using a student-generated perspective. Five case studies are presented including induction, professional development and placement review. These cases are each in different contexts. This study also develops a group-level concept of learning design. This approach has a structural view of group learning which consists of different ways of organising interaction amongst the whole class. In addition, it also has a psychological view of group learning based around the psychological impact of group membership and different group-level perspectives. This is in contrast with conventional instructional design approaches to pedagogy which are based on representative individuals. In response to this group-level approach, this study reviews individual and socio-cultural theories of learning on order to understand the interaction between individual and whole-group perspectives which are a feature of this practice. Social Identity theory is added to this as a potential bridge between these different theoretical frameworks. Shared Thinking, the name given to this group-level practice, completes the design, theory and practice framework of this study. This practice points to the pedagogical complexity implied by new uses of classroom technologies discussed in this study. The combination of an instrumentalist and a social psychological aspect of pedagogy illustrate this complexity based around the development and manipulation of a shared sense of identity. The tutor’s role therefore combines management of the process with the curation of social identity.

There has been much written about active learning in higher education over the last few decades however, there is a lack of a cohesive definition or any critique of this term. Active learning is often associated with learning and teaching which is progressive and involves student participation. As the demographic of students in higher education continues to change, learning and teaching needs to adapt, therefore it is important to explore what teachers and students mean when they use the term active learning. The main aim of this research project was to investigate active learning in the context of higher education. This research includes an exploration of whether there is a relationship between active learning and good teaching as well as investigating if the understanding and practice of active learning is influenced by teachers’ and students’ beliefs about the purpose of university education. In this research, active learning is considered predominantly from a UK perspective, and alongside this I also provide some small international examples of perspectives on active learning. Finally, drawing on the literature and findings of this project, this research offers two new conceptualisations of active learning in higher education. One main research question guided this project: what is active learning in the context of higher education? There were two sub questions: is there a relationship between good teaching and active learning and how do students’ and teachers’ beliefs about the purpose of a university education influence the practice of active learning? Employing case study methodology, data for this research project was collected at the University of Glasgow, UK. A small amount of data was also collected using opportunistic sampling in three international settings: An-Najah National University, Nablus, occupied Palestinian territories; Hawler Medical University, Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq; and University of Cape Coast, Ghana. In total there were 13 Interviews with teaching staff, 3 focus groups with students and 14 observations of teaching. Data was collected across a range of disciplines and included postgraduate, undergraduate and adult education. The main findings in this research were: (i) active learning in higher education continues to be a messy, complex and an inconsistently defined term; (ii) active learning can be more than just physical activity, it can be a set of beliefs and attitudes towards learning itself; (iii) national culture and context are not significantly influential in the practice and understanding of active learning, many themes in this research were trans-contextual; (iv) active learning can happen when teachers give students a framework from which they can build, shape and direct their own learning. This research offers two new conceptualisations of active learning; the first relates to how teachers promote active learning, the second relates to how active learning is understood and practised by students. These new conceptualisations challenge previous research in active learning which has tended to be over-simplified and under-critiqued. The main recommendations of this research are: (i) that teachers and students must continue to have dialogue about active learning, what it means, what it looks like and its perceived benefits, (ii) that teachers should be aware that they can promote active learning in different ways, (iii) Teachers should adopt teaching strategies which help promote a deep approach to active learning and students should be willing to be reflective and take responsibility for their learning.

This research identifies the prevalent external forces that have been a catalyst to change in governance and management structures in UK universities. It reviews the effects of growing commercialisation against a backdrop of changing funding dynamics. The study included the political forces that have transformed higher education, alongside the proliferation of managerialism. It examines these effects against traditional welfarist and altruistic views of education, further investigating the differing management structures and archetypes that exist. In addition to this, the research reviews the effects of these forces against the more complex university typology of ancient, red brick. plate glass and new institutions. Utilising the pragmatic philosophical underpin the research employs mixedmethodological approaches of qualitative exploratory desk research, quantitative questionnaires and ultimately qualitative interviews. These entailed the analysis of data both inductively and deductively. Questionnaire and interview surveys were undertaken on UK universities on a range of staff groups within institutional hierarchies. These 'include senior management groups, teaching and research staff, and administrative staff to provide a diverse and reflective range of responses from all staff members. The research has identified changing notions of collegiality and traditional academic autonomy towards more managed and corporate focused management structures. It has further uncovered disparate approaches that exist against the various institutions as a factor of age of establishment rather than solely on type. It contributes to the current body of knowledge by amalgamating the different external forces and reviewing its effects on university management, further uncovering these management structures to exist as dominant-institutional and subsegmented or sub-structural forms alongside cultural permutations. The research further posits that the established dichotomy of traditional and new universities inaccurately reflects the complexity ofthe higher education sector within the UK.

This thesis explores the experiences of women who study on a part-time Foundation degree and transition on to part-time Bachelor level study. Using Foucault’s construct of governmentality, it investigates how external and internal forms of power through discourse influence the development of academic and personal identities. Data collection involved a questionnaire given to all internally progressing students followed by two stages of in-depth interviews involving five women. The first interview involved the use of images to support the creation of narratives. The second interview reviewed these narratives and considered transitional experiences. Finally, two focus groups held one year apart offered collective transitional accounts. What emerged were ways in which the women in this study responded to personal and relational forms of power through discourse. Resilience was revealed as a personal form of resistance to power that when linked to motives for study, interdependent learning and the internal progression the women experienced on to the Bachelor degree underpinned the development of strong academic and personal identities. These identities meant the women in this study considered themselves as personally and academically transformed through their experiences of studying on the Foundation degree and their subsequent transition on to Bachelor level study.

This thesis is a contribution to the field of learner corpus studies. It compares a number of different measures of accuracy and complexity in second language writing, applying those measures to a sample of 308 essays written by Kurdish university students majoring in English in three schools in Iraqi Kurdistan (at two years of study: third year and fourth year). It proposes an innovative method for measuring correctness, and integrates a number of different measures of accuracy into an Integrated Approach to Achievement. It first starts by applying the method of traditional error analysis to a sample of the data collected, and then as a result the research makes recommendations for measuring ‘correctness’ instead of concentrating on the analysis of errors. It then operationalizes those recommendations, proposing an innovative method of assessment of accuracy in L2 writing by assessing ‘correctness’ as a replacement for the measurement of error using standard methods of analysis (the T-unit and clause-based correctness analysis). As a third attempt it proposes a new method of analysis that takes various units into account and hence called the various-units-based correctness analysis. After that it brings together all the measures of accuracy in a novel and integrated assessment method called an Integrated Approach to Achievement (IAA). The thesis also uses various measures of syntactic complexity, including phrasal complexity. For measuring lexical complexity a recently developed program called the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (LCA) is used. The findings are important for both English writing pedagogy and assessment.

September 2012 English universities witnessed a near trebling of their tuition fees for full-time undergraduate courses to an average of £8,580 per year (UCAS, 2012). In the same period was the growing accountability for universities to publish and demonstrate their performance to students. The research was undertaken in 2012/13 allowing comparison of the students who began their studies on the increased tuition fees, and the students who had started their studies in the previous year and who continued to pay the lower rate of fees. The research was undertaken across two English institutions: one ‘post 1992’ University, and one Further Education (FE) college which offered degree awards. The research includes survey responses from nearly 700 students, 97 academics and five interviews with senior university staff. The study provides evidence that students choose to study to improve their future earnings, seen in the motivating factors on choosing their university. Students taking on the persona of consumers is reflected in the expected rises in standards and reported rises in institutional complaints. Both academics and students expect change within the higher education industry and in institutional cultures. In turn these have implications for developing policy and future research.

Module 3 presents the culmination of Module 1 and 2 research into learning environments modeled upon constructivist and self-determinist principles (authentic learning environments), the goal of which is to develop an understanding of factors that influence Japanese learners’ perceived values about learning environments and their propensity to engage in them. The study’s more specific goals are to ascertain the values learners assign to authentic learning environments (ALEs) and the reasons why they ascribe them; to ascertain the values these learners assign to instructor and peer relationships; to ascertain the relationships that exist between the values these learners assign to ALEs and the learners’propensity for engagement; and, to bring to light what potential such knowledge might hold for educators in Japan and beyond in the attempt to develop more functional curricula for learners. As the final installment of this modular dissertation, Module 3 will present the methodology used in the study, the results of the analyses of the collected data, a discussion of the findings and implications from those analyses, and recommendations for further research.

This thesis considers the student voice in relation to higher education and its delivery in further education colleges and the implications for leaders in the sector. It considers differences in perception and choice between widening participation students, using questionnaires, focus groups and interviews to compare two student groups undertaking full-time study of either a bachelors or a foundation degree, one group studying in a university and another group studying in a college setting. The findings inform our understanding of why some non-traditional students choose colleges and others university for their higher education. The mind-set at the stage of decision-making is already different and students are prioritising whether the present or the future is most important. Those students choosing university are future-orientated, risk-managers with a transformational approach to education. They have clear expectations of their HE experience and an understanding of the wider university experience and the delayed benefits. They are likely to be embedded choosers with a secure learner identity. Those students choosing colleges are orientated in the present, risk-averse with an instrumental approach to education. They are accepting of a different experience, with fewer expectations. They are likely to be pseudo-embedded or contingent choosers with a tentative learner identity.

Considerable resources are spent on school leavers’ and graduates’ information systems (SLGIS) in numerous European countries, but it is not clear what happens to the results. This research investigates how school leavers’ and graduates’ data are produced and to what extent the data are then applied in educational policy planning, institutional decision-making and informing students. This investigation categorises the currently available SLGIS in Europe using documentary data, analysis of which leads to a typology and the selection of three distinct cases. These cases - England, Finland and the Netherlands – are explored based on 15 élite interviews in each country, and further documentary data. The reported uses of SLGIS are broadly similar across the different case study countries, despite the clear differences in the design of their SGLIS. This suggests that the ‘value’ might not be intrinsic to the data itself but it depends on the judgement of the society. On the other hand, their uses are contrasted in terms of data-production and data-utilisation based on the interplay of data-needs of the different actors regarding the SLGIS. The data-needs of the policy and the institutional levels differ substantially. For example, whereas policy is largely content with a national picture, institutions require more detailed information at the level of educational programmes. Findings like these suggest that national and international investment in SLGIS could be made more efficient.