Journal of Higher Education and Science

184-192

Authors: Mustafa ACAR, Hüsnü BİLİR

Globalization process has been tearing down the walls, hence flattening the world. Improved transportation and communication possibilities have enabled easier and faster cross-border flow of people, money, capital, goods and services. Parallel to this, international competitiveness has become ever more important in a globalizing world. Universities, be it public or private, are critical institutions in the development, change and transformation of the nations. They can contribute to a nation’s competitiveness primarily in two ways: raising skilled labor, developing new technologies and promoting innovation. This study stresses three interrelated issues in order for the universities to make their expected contribution to a nation’s competitiveness: market-oriented operation of the universities, minimization of their dependency on public funding, and promotion of competition among universities. A university where its graduates cannot find job and there is no contribution to technology and innovation is nothing more than waste of resources. Therefore, in order to increase performance of the universities, such measures should be taken as to reduce their dependency on public funding, promote universityindustry collaboration, increase contribution of the beneficiaries to finance the expenditures of the higher education services, and allocate public funds to universities based on their academic and innovative performance.

200-204

Authors: Mohamed MILIANI

The Algerian higher education system has been undergoing a strong change that can be compared to a revolution to its structures, schemes, procedures ever since 2004: a date that corresponds to the launching of the ‘Licence-Master-Doctorate’ or ‘LMD’ reform. Not least of these procedures is the erection of a Quality system that started in 2010. Yet, one of the difficulties the implementation of the LMD system experienced, was due to the policy of slow and progressive setting up of new LMD learning schemes by universities from 2004 up to 2010 (date of last issued LMD training programs). The fact that universities were not forced to enter the new scheme was somehow detrimental to the overall policy’s coherence and advancement. Indeed, it took time for universities to switch from a dual system of university programs (old and LMD systems offered to freshmen) to a single frame, namely that of the LMD. The concern for Quality was then on the Ministry’s agenda from 2008 first through an international conference on Quality Assurance that was held in Algiers under the aegis of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. Part of the ministry’s strategic plan scheduled to go until 2030, is the procedure aiming at a quality system that consists of the following components: the LMD training package, the national qualifications framework, the quality assurance system, the quality assurance frame of reference, the national standards, and the key performance indicators.

214-219

Authors: Zeynep Medine ÖZMEN, Funda AYDIN GÜÇ

Along with the development of science, the need for academicians is also increasing day by day. In many countries doctorate is a prerequisite for academicians. So, doctorate is very important for the quality of higher education and advancement of science. Therefore, the challenges of doctoral education period to be identified and to be solved by taking the opinions of doctoral students whom will be the future academicians. In this sense, this study aimed to describe challenges of doctoral students and their strategies to overcome these challenges. For this aim, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten doctoral students in the Department of Primary or Secondary Science and Mathematics Education in Karadeniz Technical University. Challenges faced by participants and their strategies were analyzed by using qualitative methods. Two researchers analyzed the data and thematic coding was used. After two researcher coded data the reliability of the analysis was calculated as 0.86. The findings are presented with three main themes: challenges, strategies and suggestions. It was seen that the most important challenges of the students were related with their supervisors, that they usually used self abandonment strategies to solve these challenges and that their made suggestions usually related to the challenges and also strategies. Considering the challenges faced by students as well as their suggestions to cope with these, solution proposals which may contribute in the development of doctoral education in Turkey were made.

228-235

Authors: Servet ÖZDEMİR, Ali Çağatay KILINÇ, Zeki ÖĞDEM, Emre ER

The purpose of this study was to examine the satisfaction levels of the students of Faculty of Education about the quality of faculty life with respect to different variables. ‘The Quality of School Life Scale’ originally developed by Epstein and McPartland (1976) and adapted into Turkish by Yılmaz and Çokluk & Bökeoğlu (2006) was used to gather data. A total of 287 students studying at Mehmet Akif University Faculty of Education in 2012-2013 academic year participated in the study. Results revealed that students’ satisfaction levels on the quality of faculty life were of medium level. Students’ satisfaction levels on the quality of faculty life differed significantly according to their grade level, where as their satisfaction levels did not differ significantly according to gender, age, and receiving scholarship variables. Suggestions were presented to increase the satisfaction levels of the students in terms of the quality of faculty life at the end of the research.

244-251

Authors: Yalçın KANBAY, Özgür ASLAN, Elif IŞIK, Nurhayat KILIÇ

Due to the fact that critical thinking and problem solving skills are essential components of educational and social lives of individuals, this present study which investigate critical thinking and problem solving skills of undergraduate students of nursing was planned. This is a descriptive study. The study population consisted of undergraduate nursing students of a university during the 2011-2012 academic year. Any specific sampling method was not determined and only the voluntary students was enrolled in the study . Several participants were excluded due to incomplete questionnaires, and eventually a total of 231 nursing students were included in the final sampling. Socio Demographic Features Data Form and the California Critical Thinking Disposition Scale and Problem Solving Inventory were used for data collection. The mean age of 231 subjects (148 girls, 83 boys) was 21.34. The mean score of critical thinking was 255.71 for the first-grade, 255.57 for the second-grade, 264.73 for the third-grade, and 256.468 for the forth-grade students. The mean score of critical thinking was determined as 257.41 for the sample, which can be considered as an average value. Although there are mean score differences of critical thinking between the classes , they were not statistically significant (p> 0.05). With regard to the mean score of problem solving, the first-grade students had 92.86, the second-grade students had 94. 29, the third-grade students had 87.00, and the forth-grade students had 92.87. The mean score of problem solving was determined as 92.450 for the sample. Although there are differences between the classes in terms of mean scores of problem solving, it was not found statistically significant (p> 0.05). In this study, statistically significant correlation could not be identified between age and critical thinking skills of the subjects (p>0.05). However, a negative correlation was identified at low levels between critical thinking skills and problem solving skills. Accordingly, problem solving scores increased in parallel to an increase in the critical thinking scores. Problem Solving Inventory is a measuring tool indicating an increase in the problem solving skills in parallel to a decrease in the scores. Therefore, as the critical thinking skills of individuals go up, their problem solving skills also increase. Furthermore, according to the outcomes of the study, critical thinking and problem solving skills of the students did not show any correlation between genders (p>0.05). As a result, we concluded that the mean scores of critical thinking skills were found at medium levels among nursing students and the mean scores of critical thinking and problem-solving skills between the classes displayed no differences. In addition, no relationship between the age and gender of the subjects and their critical thinking and problem solving skills was identified. Moreover, in parallel to an increase in the scores of critical thinking skills, problem solving skills also increased.

97-107

Authors: Ali Rıza ERDEM

The concept of “autonomy” is mostly discussed at the institutional level. The term “autonomy” literally refers to “the right of self administration of an institution under its own legal constitution”. It has not only been a subject on which much has been negotiated in the academic world until far and a subject on which has never been reached a full agreement yet but also a subject which has been distinctively interpreted by all sides. To realize their social responsibilities in a best way, universities have to get the opportunity of an autonomous constitution. Moreover, this autonomy essentially depends on the existence of a harmonious financial, academic and administrational system. Today there is no a fully autonomised university but extent of autonomous. For an institution, a financial autonomy is “the state of driving its own expenditures by using freely its own sources”. It is of three dimensions, one of which is preparing its own budget, the other of which is constituting its own financial sources and the last of which is using its own financial sources. Today, in this respect, there is no yet “a fully autonomised university” in the world, because they are not capable of meeting the money which they need for their existence. To all people who have academic titles, “academic autonomy” necessarily refers to a chance of free education and researches free of all kinds of pressure and orientation attempts. According to Turkish constitution, academic freedom is limited to national defense and security & social order. According to a report in the ninth plan of development, released by “High Commission of Academic Education”, there is also not a fully academic autonomy. By the word “Administrational Autonomy” in universities, it is certainly meant that those institutions are driven and inspected by their own democratic organs whose members are necessarily democratically appointed. According to in the ninth plan of development released by “High Commission of Academic Education”, it is regarded as a weak point for government to try to interrupt higher education policies by using certain governmental policies.

117-127

Authors: Sultan Selen YAZGÜNOĞLU, M. Çağatay ÖZDEMİR

The aim of this study is to determine the opinions of academic staff about the higher education law draft. Survey model is used in this study as we aimed to describe existing facts as they are. The study was conducted with 61 academic staff from Ahi Evran University in Turkey. In this study ‘ the opinions about the law draft of Higher Education Council survey is used as the data collecting tool and the internal accuracy was measured using Cronbach’s Alpha reliability (the result was 723). The study showed that “paid study leave for instructors” is perceived as the best article among academic staff. Besides, academic staff believe that it is necessary to include the clear description of the performance criteria of the academic staff in the law.

133-141

Authors: Gamze KASALAK

The aim of this research is to describe the views of the academic staff working at Akdeniz University about the Erasmus Teaching Staff Mobility Programme. This study is a qualitative research. The study was designed as a holistic single case descriptive study. The data for this research were obtained from seven voluntary academic staff who experienced this programme. Semi-structured interview was used as the data collection tool. The data collected were figured out using frequency analysis technique which is included in descriptive analysis of qualitative research. At the end of the study, it can be said that participants have joined the programme for creating mutual projects, gaining abroad experience and they had expectations for strengthening the relationship with the hosting university; they had the opportunity to recognize different languages, different countries, universities, cultures, instructors and education systems; they encountered some problems like programme duration, transportation, foreign language, nutrition, bureaucratic problems, climate and information sharing and they offered some suggestions such as expanding the duration of the programme, increasing the amount of the grant and the number of participants.

153-160

Authors: Hasan Said TORTOP

The aim of this study is to reveal preservice teachers’ metaphors about the lecturers at university. Study group of the research consists of 347 preservice teachers enrolled at three different education faculties in Turkey in 2011-2012 academic year. Data was obtained from the preservice teachers’ completion of the sentences such as “University teacher is like ..., because ...”. For analysing the data quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. As a result, 183 metaphors were determined about University teachers in 16 conceptual categories. The categories which produced metaphors most about the University teachers are as follows; university teachers as the source and passer one of the knowledge (42 metaphors), the university teacher as a guide one (38 metaphors), the university teacher as a changing one (24 metaphors), the university teacher as a scary-repelling one (21 metaphors), the university teacher as a versatile one (17 metaphors) respectively. Besides, the metaphors can be used as an evaluation tool for determining the performance of a university teacher at studies of increasing quality in higher education.

166-172

Authors: Hatice YALÇIN, Murat DEMİREKİN

Women constitute nearly 41%of academic staff in our country. Among all academic staff, the ratio of female academicians is increasing as it is approached to rural areas from suburbs. This study aims to reveal the perceptions of undergraduate education students about female academicians’ working life conditions. Considering available time and facilities, the universe of research was limited within a university; as it was primarily intended to reveal students’ individual perceptions on the conditions of women academics, the students’ being at the undergraduate level was at the fore front of study rather than the academic departments of the university. The survey data form were applied to 157 female and 104 male undergraduate students (N = 261) studying at faculties and schools of the university where the survey was applied excluding freshmen classes.. Descriptive tests were used to evaluate the data. The findings were evaluated by x ² test, which were formerly tested according to the desires of students on what to get on their education and whether they were willing to be academicians. 54%of female students involved in the research stated that they were “partially” satisfied with the female academics. While 74,3%of the students agreed on the question “Should women work as academicians?”, only 2.2%percent stated that women should not work as academicians. 47,8%consider that there is a partial discrimination between the male and female members of academic life. 47,1%mentioned that working as an academician was a barrier to being a good mother or a good wife and 69,7%stated that working as a female academician was a tough work. 23,7%of the students think that being an academician is mostly beneficial in terms of personal development for a woman. 79,6%stated that the biggest challenge for female academics is to sustain the academic studies as well as being a mother and a wife. The best advantage of being female academician was revealed as one’s prestige over her husband, family and within the social circles. As a result of the findings, it can be concluded that students are usually aware of the problems about the conditions of female academicians, and they have developed some sensitivity to the issue.

10-15

Authors: Zekai ŞEN

In Turkey, while academic staff is assessed quantitively, assessment on quality takes place only about students.evaluations are always applied mechanically through western standards without considering our cultural qualities. In this process, the staff member quality standards of Western countries stay outside theTurkish boundarie. Therefore, with every attempt to increase the quality of higher education, students’ and research asisstants’ quality is improved but the aimed quality is never realised. In fact, the quality improvement in an institution should start from the top so that the reflections of this improvement should be seen in those under their and total quality augmentation Dynamics should arise. InTurkey, instead of total quality, the quality of the lower level workers is thought to be improved and not much is realised as a result of performing all the plans, projects and educational settings without considering the quality of higher ranking academicians. As a consequence of this mentioned situation masters and Ph. D.thesis done in Turkish universities can not provide reflections in international domain. Turkey thinks to compensate the gap by sending its youngsters in an unplanned manner to especially the USA. Even the M.Sc. and PH.D. thesis supervised by those who were educated in the USA and got academic titles there can not gain international quality. By the authorities, the sole reason for this is always clamied to be the inquality of the students. In this study it will be focused that the reson for this problem does not take it’s source from the quality of the students but the academic staff eventhough they were educated abroad. It will also be mentioned that the main reasons why the masters and Ph.D. thesis can not gain an international quality are the quality of the academicians is only linked to the academic promotion and eventhough in theory the promotions appear to be scientific , in practice they are usually out of scientific scale such as the philosophy of life of the academician, personal advantage and friendly relations. These sort of relations constitute obstacles in front of scientific developments.

27-37

Authors: Emel AKÖZER

The Council of Higher Education (CoHE) adopted the National Qualifications Framework for Higher Education in Turkey (NQF-HETR) in May 2009, as part of the Bologna reforms. In January 2010, the CoHE decided full implementation of the NQF-HETR at institutional and program levels and in this decision, it was foreseen that the process would be completed by the end of December 2012. The NQFHETR has been aligned both to the overarching Framework for Qualifications in the European Higher Education Area (QF-EHEA, 2005) and to the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning (EQF-LLL, 2008). The latter was introduced to facilitate the European cooperation in education and training, in line with the goals of the European Union's (EU) Lisbon Strategy. This paper focuses on some of the problems that have become apparent during the NQF-HETR's implementation at the levels of “narrow fields of education” and architecture programs, and the challenges ahead. Following a discussion of the significance of the two European frameworks in light of the goals of the EHEA, the Education and Training 2010 work programme (ET 2010) and the strategic framework for European cooperation in Education and Training (ET 2020), it covers two problem areas concerning qualifications in architecture: i) terminological and classificatory problems entailed by the NQF-HETR; ii) the lack of alignment between the European qualifications frameworks and the EU Directive on the Recognition of Professional Qualifications (Directive EC/2005/36) that covers seven “sectoral professions” including architecture. The paper also reviews the latest developments for the modernization of the EU Directive in order to provide progression in forming an integrated European Higher Education Area.

48-56

Authors: Filiz GÖLPEK

In many countries, a higher education system which is based on welfare state practices prevails. In this system, the services are substantially provided by the state free of charge or at quite low prices. Since the services are financed by taxes, additional sources cannot be provided; and because of the fact that it doesn’t entail a real cost benefit comparison by the users, it leads to inefficiency. From the early 80s on, there has been a tendency towards the marketing mechanisms in the provision of many public services such as education due to both strong theoretical and empirical reason, and the restrictions in public financing. Together with this tendency, the question of who benefits from education services is tried to be answered in order to discuss the stimulation of activities and additional resources on a reasonable base. The aim of this study is to determine whether it is the individual or the society who benefits from this public service at the higher education level by calculating private and social return rates through internal return rate technique which is one of the cost benefit analysis method. Findings from calculations have shown that the individual gains more than the society after a four-year university education.

65-69

Authors: Şule ERGÖL, Meltem KÜRTÜNCÜ

The study was made to determine violence experienced by nurse students in clinical settings. It was applied to the School of Health Nursing Student of a university during a week in June, 2010. There were 360 students, 53 of whom were senior, 60 of whom were thirdyear, 114 of whom were sophomore, 79 of whom were first-year and 102 of whom were prep-school students, at the school. Students in preparatory classes were not included in the scope of the study since they didn’t take applied courses. 70,58% of the students were reached. It was determined that the students were often exposed to verbal abuse and sexism in clinical setting and the abuse was performed by their colleagues.

80-84

Authors: Yelda FIRAT, Yılmaz KILIÇASLAN, Özlem UÇAR

From a general point of view, the defined reality models by using a formal language are called formal ontology. These general purposeful models can be also used in the special fields of application. Because ontologies are large-scale by their nature, they have the potential of hosting errors and deficiencies in case they are generated by human labor. Besides, an ontology formed such a way will be difficult to be adapted to a application specific. In this study, an application of a computerized formal ontology formation saved from probable problems which are likely to arise using human labor will be introduced. In the application, semantic analysis of Turkish has been targetted as a special application field using corpus-based marking method in the framework of formal concept analysis. Beside the applications of these kinds of natural language processing formal ontologies are used considerably in the field of education as they present the information in the way of semantic structures clearly and meaningfully. The most important reasons of this are the use of the information technologies such as expansion of constructivist approach and the concept maps used for educational reasons.