Search results

Conceptual physical education (CPE) classes have been widely offered to promote a healthy lifestyle in higher education settings. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of a CPE course on health-related fitness (HRF) levels among college freshmen.

A pre- and post-test research design was used. In total, 50 freshmen in a US university were enrolled in a 13-week CPE course. Their HRF levels were assessed by the Fitnessgram at the beginning and the end of the course.

Students significantly enhanced their aerobic capacity, upper-body muscle strength and endurance, abdominal muscle strength and endurance, and decreased body fat percentage. No significant improvement in flexibility was found among the total sample. However, non-kinesiology students significantly enhanced their flexibility while the opposite trend was found among kinesiology students. Female students reduced more body fat percentage, while male students increased their aerobic capacity more rapidly than their female counterparts.

The CPE course could yield significant improvement in HRF among freshmen, regardless of sex or major. Universities may consider offering CPE courses for all students and mandate such courses as a degree requirement.

This empirical study investigated HRF level changes that occurred after a CPE course intervention among college freshmen. Sex and major difference in HRF changes were revealed. The interventions included in the CPE course could help improve freshmen's HRF levels in future intervention programs in a similar setting.

The public sector is one of the least addressed areas of intellectual capital (IC) research. Universities are an interesting area of investigation because they are considered critical players in the knowledge-based society. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general, flexible and comprehensive “IC Maturity Model” for Universities (ICMM), a framework for defining and implementing IC measurement and management approaches, as part of the whole strategic management of universities. Thus, the ICMM proposes a staged framework to initiate a step-by-step change within a university based upon its current level of IC management maturity. The different steps of maturity might be an answer to cope with the huge diversity of European universities, some of which have strong managerial orientation, while others follow collegial forms of governance.

The research approach is based on what has been called the “third stage” of IC research (Dumay and Garanina, 2013), focused on the practices of IC approaches rather than on its theoretical conceptualisation. The ICMM has been developed under the “Quality Assurance in Higher Education through Habilitation and Auditing” project framework, initiated by the Executive Agency for Higher Education and Research Funding of Romania (EUFISCDI). Three Mutual Learning Workshops (MLWs) were organised as a mean to bring together 15 international experts and practitioners to share their views and experience on IC reporting and setting up task forces.

An ICMM, which is a flexible model of implementing IC approaches within public universities, is developed. The ICMM provides a theoretical continuum along which the process of maturity can be developed incrementally from one level to the next, moving from IC data collection, awareness of IC, adjustment of IC specific indicators, measurement of IC, reporting of IC, interpretation and decision making, strategy and planning.

Future research needs to conduct empirical studies in universities to generalise the effectiveness of the ICMM model and guidelines for implementation.

The ICMM provides a staged framework to initiate a step-by-step change within a university based upon its current level of IC management maturity and its IC value creation dynamics. It allows universities to follow different paths, not necessarily a linear sequence.

Although several methods for IC measurement and management exist, most of these cannot accommodate the trade-off between the comparability aims and the efforts to capture the institution’s uniqueness when designing an IC model.

This paper discusses findings from qualitative research exploring young asylum seekers' (aged 18‐25) definitions and experiences of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ at a time of transition to adulthood and adjustment to life in a new country. Previous research on refugees and asylum seekers has focused largely on either children or adults, often failing to highlight the particular experiences of those in young adulthood. It will be argued that young asylum seekers of this age have specific needs and experiences associated with the dual transition they face, in both adapting to life in the UK and becoming adults, and the changing support network and entitlements available to them as they go through this process.

This paper aims to use perspectives from both mainstream and feminist welfare state research in drafting a conceptual approach for social care research. This approach is then applied empirically to a comparative analysis of childcare provisions of 15 OECD countries.

The concept of dedomestication is developed from a discussion on the notions of decommodification and defamilisation, and it is defined as the degree to which social care policies make it possible for people to participate in society and social life outside their homes and families. In the empirical part of the paper, dedomestication of childcare service provisions of 15 welfare states is measured by an index that is constructed on the basis of time replacement rate, availability, affordability, quality, and take‐up rates of care services.

Denmark offers the highest degree of dedomestication to parents of young children, followed by a group of Nordic and Western European countries. In English‐speaking “liberal regime” nations, dedomestication remains more limited but it is lowest in the Central European countries of Hungary and Austria. The findings only partly follow earlier welfare regime categorisations.

The paper develops a new original conceptual framework for comparative study of care services that is then applied to an empirical analysis of childcare provisions in 15 welfare states, bringing out new results on the breadth of welfare state services.

Leisure counselling is a fresh and, as yet, relatively underdeveloped, therapeutic approach to a range of emotional stressors, with work‐stress prominent amongst them. Having identified a triad of approach strategies: distraction, anticipation and confrontation, this study seeks to root them theoretically and practically within cognitive‐behavioural, psychodynamic, role‐adaptive and humanistic research findings.

This paper aims to explore the possibilities of combining foresight techniques and intellectual capital management, as two approaches of participatory strategic management, in higher education institutions. The objective is to generate concrete benefits for prospective strategic management in the academic sector. It also aims to focus on how it may be possible for universities to address the challenges of major change management programmes by implementing foresight and intellectual capital management models.

The paper reviews recent literature both on conceptual issues and experiences in relation to foresight and intellectual capital. The paper presents an ongoing project focused on the development of a vision for the future of the higher education system in Romania and a frame to differentiate Romanian universities.

A proposal of an integrated use of foresight and intellectual capital management for universities is suggested. The case study presented illustrates how foresight provides an excellent approach to address the question of how to develop a shared vision of the future and jointly define a strategy to best adapt an organization to the new context, and intellectual capital management models play a role in strategic management, resource allocation and monitoring of objectives and organization performance.

The issues addressed in the paper could provide the starting point for better integration of strategic management in higher education institutions.

The paper explores two concepts closely related but that have not been analysed together: the relationship between Intellectual capital approaches and foresight.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of select technical higher education institutes of national importance in India. This helps to judge the efficiency and effectiveness of an institute to provide valuable insights on performance measurement and effectiveness not only to the respective institute but also to governmental agencies and policymakers.

The paper makes a comparative analysis across various educational institutes of repute. This paper looks at the performance of four technical higher education institutes of India. An integrated data envelopment analysis–analytic hierarchy processing (DEA–AHP) approach has been used to compare and evaluate the relative efficiencies in terms of input provided to the institute to produce outputs.

The results depict the performances of the four institutes over the period of five years and, in turn, help assess the increase or decrease in the performance of a particular institute in comparative assessment. The paper also helps identify the most efficient institute among the four institutes that have been compared, in terms of academic efficiency, research efficiency, teaching efficiency and consulting efficiency.

A study like this would furnish an insight into the performance of the select higher educational institutes. The findings can be useful for policymakers, educational planners and administrators in designing a system based on various criteria that can help improve the overall efficiency and decide about benchmarking and funding strategies.

This paper is an attempt toward defining, conceptualizing and measuring performance effectiveness of institutes of higher education in the Indian context. The effort at the integration of the methodologies (through comparison and DEA–AHP) has helped to provide insights that could not have been obtained through the use of the methods or techniques alone. The paper has helped identify critical strategic issues and parameters which when implemented would be useful for policymakers, educational planners and administrators in designing a system based on various criteria that can help improve the overall efficiency of educational institutes in higher education.

The paper aims to present and interpret excellence through the parchments of the ancient Hellenic philosophy and the different schools of management thought and its application in the university context.

The approach taken in the paper is theoretical and is based on the writings of ancient Hellenes philosophers and management researchers, a semasiologic analysis of the term “excellence” in Hellenic and its content in the university context and a comparison with the basic principles of total quality management (TQM).

The findings of the paper support the view that the ancient Hellenes philosophers had a substantial contribution in the development of excellence and TQM fundamental concepts, as proved by their writings 2,400 years ago. It is worth mentioning that the term aristeia (excellence, in Hellenic) hides in it, as appears from the analysis of the word, the idea of good in an exemplary way and the factors that constitute the teachings of TQM.

The paper brings out the essence of excellence and proves that deep understanding of the concept of excellence leads to a virtuous personal life which leads in good citizenship in the wider social context that result in a constantly improving and transformative academic or professional life.

The paper presents the meaning of excellence through the combination of knowledge from the ancient Hellenic philosophy, management, Hellenic language and TQM.