Books in the Evaluating Education: Normative Systems and Institutional Practices series

This book offers a detailed analysis and assessment of the state of education round the world.

This Open Access book analyses the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education.

This book presents a number of fundamentally challenging perspectives that have been brought to the fore by the national tests on religious education (RE) in Sweden. It particularly focuses on the content under the heading Ethics. It is common knowledge that many teachers find these parts difficult to handle within RE. Further, ethics is a field that addresses a range of moral and existential issues that are not easily treated. Many of these issues may be said to belong to the philosophical context, in which "eternal questions" are gathered and reflected upon. The first chapters highlight the concepts of ethical competence and critical thinking. In the following chapters the concept of ethical competence is analyzed with regard to teachers' objectives and to students' texts, respectively. These chapters pursue a more practice-related approach and highlight specific challenges identified from both teacher and student perspectives. Next, the book raises the issue of global responsibility. What kind of critical issues arise when handling such matters at school? Further, can contemporary moral philosophers contribute to such a discussion? In turn, the book discusses the role of statistical analyses with regard to national tests, while the closing chapters present international perspectives on the book's main themes and concluding remarks.The book's critical yet constructive approach to issues regarding assessment in ethics education makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate among researchers as well as to the everyday communication on testing in schools and classrooms. As such, it will appeal to scholars in ethics education and researchers in the field of assessment, as well as educators and teachers interested and engaged in the task of testing ethics in school contexts where curricular demands for valid and authoritative evaluation may provide important guidelines, but may also pose challenges of their own.

This Open Access book analyses the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education.

1 Welcome to the World Class University: Introduction.- Part I What''s in a Word?.- 2 Disorderly Identities: University rankings and the re-ordering of the academic mind.- 3 Becoming World Class: What it means and what it does.- 4 Three Notions of the Global.- Part II World-Class Around the World.- 5 The Kafkaesque Pursuit of ''World Class'': Audit culture and the reputational arms race in academia.- 6 Complicit Reproductions in the Global South: Courting world class universities and global rankings.- 7 Realizing the World Class University: Litigation and the state.- 8 World Class at All Costs.- 9 The Paradox of the Global University.- Part III Playing the World-Class Numbers Game.- 10 World Class Universities, Rankings and the Global Space of International Students.- 11 What Counts as World Class? Global University Rankings and Shifts in Institutional Strategies.- 12 The State Role in Excellent University Policies in the Era of Globalization: The case of China.- Part IV The Future of World-Class Universities.- 13 The Marketingisation of Higher Education.- 14 Contesting the Neoliberal Discourse of the World Class University: ''Digital Socialism'', Openness and Academic Publishing.- 15 Spaces of Life: Transgressions in Conceptualising the World Class University.- 16 Realising the World-Class University: An Ecological Approach.