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This study aims to extend the knowledge and literature on which information sources influences (explicit service promises such as advertising, personal selling; implicit service promises such as tangibles and price; past experiences; word of mouth; image and reputation) Chinese students’ expectations of overseas universities’ service quality.

Data were collected from undergraduate Chinese students from two universities in Australia. A total of 133 questionnaires were returned for data analysis. Factor analysis and multiple analysis of variance were conducted for this study.

Results indicate the three most influential sources of information on Chinese students expectations of universities are: past experiences, advertising and word of mouth. Findings suggest that the more explicit and implicit service promises the respondent is exposed to; the higher the desired and predicted expectations of the university's service quality. However their level of expectations (both desired and predicted) is considerably greater when exposed to explicit service promises.

One limitation of this study includes the results obtained as not necessarily generalisable or applicable to other cultures (for instance Europeans). Future research could examine Chinese students’ formation of expectations based on other factors such as human values.

The theoretical contribution of this study consists of applying and extending Zeithaml et al.'s model, that proposes that a customer's level of expectations is dependent on several antecedents, within a higher education (pre‐purchase) context using a Chinese sample. The main managerial implication is that measuring the influence of information sources on Chinese students will provide universities with more effective ways of targeting Chinese consumers with their marketing communication campaigns.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between prospective teachers’ cultural profiles and service quality expectations in a pedagogical training program in Greece.

Using the EppekQual scale and an alternative Hofstede’s cultural scale, 113 prospective teachers in a Greek training program were surveyed. The study uses descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and multiple regression, validating measurements through confirmatory factor analysis.

Prospective teachers exhibit a low-power orientation and a preference for feminine values. Rejecting hierarchy correlates with quality expectations, especially in the curriculum dimension, emphasizing student-centric education. A positive correlation with acceptance/avoidance of uncertainty is observed, notably in learning outcomes and administrative services. The cultural aversion to ambiguity shapes individuals’ prioritization of all quality dimensions. A realistic long-term perspective correlates positively with expectations in learning outcomes, aligning with Greek culture’s emphasis on security. Contrary to expectations, a predilection for feminine values positively impacts service quality expectations, particularly in curriculum, learning outcomes and academic staff dimensions. The hypothesis related to individualism/collectivism is not substantiated, indicating a negative association with the curriculum dimension.

Tailoring program designs to embrace student-centric and collaborative learning environments is recommended. Acknowledging cultural aversions to uncertainty, program flexibility and clarity are essential. Integrating career planning and mentorship aligns with realistic long-term perspectives. The need for a balanced approach to personal and intellectual development is also suggested.

This study uncovers specific cultural dimensions that shape quality expectations within a Greek teacher training context.

This study aims to explore expectation gaps concerning the roles between educators and students in the context of venture creation courses at higher education institutions by investigating their mutual perspectives. The authors seek to answer the following research questions: (1) how is the role expectation toward the entrepreneurship education of teachers different from that of students and (2) what are the consequences of these expectation gaps in entrepreneurship education?

This study applies an explorative qualitative approach. As the research setting, the authors selected an entrepreneurship education course for advanced management students at a German public university. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with both educators and students to examine how role ambiguity emerges in venture creation courses.

This study identified discrepancies between educators and students in their fundamental assumptions regarding the role of educators and students. Such discrepancies are the autonomy-level assumption gap, capacity assumption gap and learning outcomes expectation gap. Based on the findings, this study develops a framework of expectation gaps between educators and students as sources for role ambiguity in entrepreneurship education by extending the role episode model developed in role theory.

The findings contribute to the extant literature on entrepreneurship education in several ways. First, this study reveals that students in venture creation programs can encounter role ambiguity due to differing expectations about their role between educators and students, which can negatively affect the students' perception of their learning outcome. Second, this study discovered that the possible discrepancies regarding the fundamental assumptions about the role of educators and students pose a challenge to educators. Third, the findings illuminate the importance of understanding the complex identity of students in the context of student-centered entrepreneurship education.

This study offers several practical implications for entrepreneurship educators in higher education institutions. First, this study reveals the confusion among students concerning their role in entrepreneurship education. As such, it is recommended that educators explain to students the purpose of the student-centered pedagogical approach and the expected role of students in acting as independent entrepreneurial agents. Second, while student-centered entrepreneurship education is based on the fundamental assumption that students are motivated to develop their own startup projects, educators must consider the nature of students' motivation and their overall student-life situation. Finally, this study demonstrates the importance of creating an active feedback loop so that entrepreneurship teachers can be aware of such perceptional gaps between educators and students and understand the sources of these gaps.

While the extant literature indicates the existence of perceptual gaps between educators and students in the context of entrepreneurship education, how these gaps emerge and influence the outcome of entrepreneurship education remained unclear. One critical reason for the under-investigation of this issue was that existing studies predominantly emphasize the educators' perspectives, although such expectation gaps can only emerge through the discrepant views of two different parties. This study tackled this research gap by considering the mutual perspective of educators and students by applying role theory.

The purpose of this paper is to present the viewpoint that student role identity, its dimensions and salience, impact strongly on student expectations of college-based higher education (CBHE) within the UK.

The paper draws on doctoral research undertaken within the context of CBHE in the UK and is further supported through engagement with a range of pertinent literature.

The paper suggests ways in which the individually constructed student role identity may impact on the expectations of the experience of CBHE. In so doing, the paper highlights the way in which expectations of higher education recursively influence, and are influenced by, perceptions and actions played out from within the student role.

The empirical research, from which the paper draws its theme, was undertaken in one large institution. The author recognises that a wider, longitudinal study would be beneficial in recognition of the diversity of provision in the CBHE sector.

The paper proposes that greater awareness of the way in which students construct and moderate their perceptions and understandings of studenthood would be beneficial to a range of strategic considerations, such as promotional information, partnership activity, peer relations and the nature of pedagogies and learning architectures.

The paper foregrounds the political remit of CBHE as a progression route for “non-traditional” students, and considers the varied understandings of the meaning of the student role adopted by students attending colleges. Engagement with issues of multiple roles, identity salience and variable role porosity highlights social and pyschosocial issues faced by many such students.

The paper considers role identity in the context of Kurt Lewin’s conceptualisation of life space and uses this framework to highlight issues that may face students and colleges in raising awareness of student expectations. It challenges the homogenous conceptualisation of the term “students” through consideration of the psychic state at a given moment in time.

Discusses aspects of current service quality theory in the context of British higher education (HE). Focuses on the role of the student as primary consumer of HE services (a relatively recent conceptualization in this country), and the implications of this for the management of service quality in higher education organizations (HEOs). Briefly discusses an exploratory study which has monitored a group of students′ expectations and perceptions of service quality over time. Because of its limited scope, the findings of this study may not be generalized to the student population as a whole. However, it does serve to highlight the need for HEOs to gather information on students′ expectations, not only during their time at university, but at the point of arrival and before, to manage students′ expectations from enrolment through to graduation, in order to align them as closely as possible with what can be delivered by way of service quality, for the student evaluation process, or upward appraisal to be dealt with in a much more detailed, comprehensive and multi‐focused way than tends to be the case currently at many British universities. Acknowledges the need for further research to investigate all of these matters.

Gender-specific segregation of occupations has remained a typical characteristic of contemporary labour markets. From an individual perspective, (gender-)specific positioning in the labour market is the result of longer-term developments over the life course; these may be influenced by specific macro-level conditions. For example, education and training systems may differ in the information they provide for individual educational and occupational decisions and in the biographical consequences of these decisions. This chapter analyses the potential relevance of education and training systems for gender-specific occupational expectations at a comparatively young age. The empirical analyses use data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000, 2003 and 2006 and from the European Labour Force Survey (ELFS), comparing occupational gender segregation in early individual expectations and in the labour force across 22 European countries. In a multi-level analysis, expectations are related to both individual-level predictors and characteristics of education and training systems. The results show that anticipated choices of gender-specific occupations are loosely related to characteristics of education and training systems. In particular, the degree of vocational enrolment seems to enforce the level of segregation. However, these associations are group-specific and rather small. Education and training systems also tend to have different consequences for the expectations of young women and young men. Gender segregation already exists at early biographical stages, but it is often modified by later adaptation and the selective behaviour of institutions and employers.

It has long been established in educational stratification research that teachers play an important role in shaping children's school experience, which is closely associated with children's educational outcomes. Children's family background has been considered as one of the factors that may influence how teachers form their evaluations of children's behavior and academic competence, and their educational expectations for children. Going beyond the conventional modeling of using measures of the family's socioeconomic situation alone, this chapter incorporates the teachers' perceptions of the importance of children's family background into the examination of teachers' evaluations and expectations. Using a unique data from northwest China, this study provides a case study to highlight the importance of bringing teachers' perspectives into examining the relationship between children's family background and their educational outcomes. The analysis results reveal that teachers' perceptions of the importance of children's family background, above and beyond children's previous academic achievement and their family's actual socioeconomic situations, are closely associated with teachers' evaluations and expectations. Teachers' expectations at early time point help to predict children's later school persistence.

Many studies have integrated the mechanism of Creative Commons (CC) or similar mechanisms into web 2.0 platforms for supporting learning. The CC mechanism may create new types of knowledge sharing environments. The purpose of this paper is to explore students’ trust, knowledge sharing self-efficacy, and outcome expectations in the context of a knowledge sharing platform using the CC mechanism.

The participants were 86 sixth-grade Taiwanese students. Within the context of online drawing and storytelling activities, a quantitatively self-reported instrument was adopted to assess the sharing experience with the CC mechanism.

The results found complex interrelationships among trust, sharing self-efficacy, and outcome expectations identified in the literature. The results further reveal that students who showed high community-related outcome expectations would adopt the non-CC approach (read-only, i.e. the shared works can not be used and modified) as they possessed lower identification-based trust. In contrast, those who adopted CC approach (i.e. the shared works are able to be used and modified) placed higher level of economy-based trust and showed a lower level of community-related outcome expectations. The results reflect that students who have low performance expectancy and sharing self-efficacy are more willing to share their work using the CC approach.

The results of this paper show that in such a mechanism there exists close interplay between trust, sharing self-efficacy, and outcome expectations. It is therefore, suggested that researchers and educators should note the influence of the sharing mechanism on the sharing activity when knowledge sharing is involved in pedagogical design. The implications derived from the findings for educational practice were also discussed.

Students, faculty staff and universities thrive and reach their full potential through planning and a sense of community. In a few short weeks, COVID-19 unravelled months of planning, separated the university community and shifted tertiary education to remote learning. This created a triangulated expectations–performance gap as to what could be reasonably implemented to support student learning, support educators and provide a continued sense of community. The purpose of this paper is to consider how educators could implement strategies to close the expectations gap created by COVID-19 remote learning.

The authors consider the expectations gap through pre-COVID-19 pedagogical strategies and teaching methods, then outline how we modified them into COVID-19 teaching approaches and designs.

The authors found that although expectations differ between university administration, students and faculty staff, there are a number of paths educators can take to close the expectations gap, facilitate interaction and engagement while gently encouraging self-driven student learning in a difficult time.

The practical exemplars identify steps educators can take as support mechanisms for student learners to embrace and take control of their own education in the remote learning environment and convey the importance of maintaining a sense of belonging. This creates an improved teaching environment for educators and an enhanced learning environment for students.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and interpret the critical quality attributes of core educational services at the course level both with student and lecturer involvement. Significant differences between the viewpoints of these two directly involved stakeholder groups are also demonstrated to provide a better understanding of student expectations.

Students of quality management courses were invited to collect those attributes that could have an impact on their perceived educational service quality. The compiled list of 23 characteristics has been formed on the basis of a four-point Likert scale-based questionnaire. With approximately 360 responses, thorough statistical analyses have been executed to investigate whether any significant differences could be detected between the quality attributes perceived by the different student segments. A group of lecturers has also been invited to fulfil the same questionnaire to compare their viewpoints with those of the students.

The results allow us to identify critical quality attributes which may be used in all platforms and interactions with students. The conclusions can be implemented on the course level to adjust the plan-do-check-act-based improvement of courses in which lecturers are directly interested.

As the new generation of students increasingly regard themselves as customers, they have become more aware of how they are taught and how they participate in the learning process. Institutionalizing this approach may contribute to the shaping of the organizational quality culture by emphasizing student focus and may result in the identification of best practices and standardization of processes at the course level.