Kay I. Penny

Ian D. Morton

Mohammed Z. Ashraf

John C. Duffy

The performance of institutions such as universities and colleges is of increasing interest to funders, policy makers, potential students and the establishments themselves who require accurate estimates of outcomes such as retention rates across the different institutions. The UK government has an aim of reducing the cost of non-completion by students, the institutions themselves are concerned with retaining student numbers because they affect reputation and financial health, and prospective students must choose which institution they would prefer to attend. This study controls for differences in student background characteristics in a comparison of retention of Scottish students in Scottish Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with Scottish students studying at HEIs elsewhere in the UK. The latter group is known to have better retention than the former. Propensity score matching is applied to the Scottish cohort of students, as a preliminary to producing an imputation of their counterfactual outcome. The findings show that Scottish students would be approximately 2 percentage points less likely to continue their studies if they had studied in Scotland rather than studied elsewhere in the UK.

Jinyan Huang

Michael Reilly

Using generalizability theory approach, this study examined manager and worker differences in their perceptions and ratings of 28 positive and 21 negative leader characteristics in terms of their leadership effectiveness and ineffectiveness in a skilled trades business. Seventeen managers and randomly selected 17 workers from a Western New York trades business participated in the study. The results show that raters’ employment status (manager vs. worker) did impact their perceptions and ratings of the 28 positive leader characteristics contributing to leadership effectiveness and 21 negative leader characteristics leading to leadership ineffectiveness. Important implications are discussed.

Lee Pugalis

Alan R. Townsend

At what scale should regional development policy be administered? Indeed, should economic leadership be constituted across similar scales of governance? These crucial questions have caught the interest of academics, policymakers and politicians across all global regions. Decentralization is a favored policy administered in response to the dynamics of economic globalization, especially in an age of fiscal austerity as public service responsibilities are increasingly being devolved to alternative scales. This paper addresses these theoretical and practical questions through the case of England, which in 2010, in contrast to other European countries, initiated the disassembly of formal regional machinery. The paper interrogates the political, economic and administrative dimensions for this course of action and examines the configuration of informal public-private economic leadership partnerships that have succeeded formal regional machinery. The research reveals a noteworthy correlation between these latest scalar entities and those that have been trialed over the past 50 years. This leads the paper to conclude that the search for a scalar solution to the governance of development is set to continue as the scalar conundrum remains.

Nicholas Sun-Keung PANG

John Pisapia

This study investigates how school leaders in Hong Kong are responding to the period of rapid and discontinuous change that has been characteristic of the education system in Hong Kong over recent years. Specifically the researchers argue that school leaders need to think and act strategically through the application of advanced cognitive capabilities in order to prepare their schools for ongoing professional development and school improvement. The researchers draw upon a large scale questionnaire (a total of 635 school leaders at a senior management level) in which school leaders self-reported how systems thinking, reflection and reframing affected school leaders’ practice of strategic execution. They found that those school leaders that demonstrated a higher use of systems thinking and reflecting in strategic thinking skills also reported a greater use of a range of leadership influence actions. This study has further implications for leadership selection processes, professional development and better understanding the theory of strategic leadership in education.

UI Research Center

UI AWARDS (2012-2013)
UI Outstanding Research Scholar Award