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Development of a Comprehensive Framework of Excellence in Higher Education
MAŠKOVÁ, Ivana
Excellent students have usually been defined in terms of high academic achievement, which, however, could be associated with undesirable motivational and behavioural correlates. Working on the assumption that excellence in higher education is a precursor of occupational excellence, which integrates high-quality work with ethical behaviour, excellence in university settings should be reconsidered. This thesis was underpinned by two research questions: Who is really an excellent university student? How to identify an excellent university student? In this respect, we conducted four intermediate studies that together build a comprehensive conceptual and methodological framework of excellence in higher education. The first study aimed to establish an empirically-based conceptualization of an excellent university student. The results of an investigation between university students and teachers showed that excellence in higher education is an interaction between educational excellence, which refers to students who are deeply knowledgeable, engaged, and able to turn their knowledge and skills into actions and desirable high-quality outcomes, and personal excellence that concerns prosocial, moral, and self-reflective behaviour of students. In the second study, we aimed to find, whether the core excellent students' attribute of genuine study motivation, conceptualized as mastery goal orientation along with deep approach to learning, is indicated or contradicted by students' grade point average (GPA). The results revealed that GPA neither indicates, nor contradicts the attribute of genuine study motivation. In the third study, we designed and implemented the procedure of excellent students' identification based on a multisource assessment that involved teacher nomination/assessment, academic achievement assessment, and peer assessment. The implementation of this methodology resulted in a final sample of 10 excellent individuals meeting all the conceptually-derived criteria of excellence. The fourth study aimed to evaluate the implemented methodology in terms of its discriminating ability to differentiate between excellent and non-excellent students. In this respect, we achieved satisfactory results. After reviewing the results generated by the implementation and evaluation of the proposed methodology, we suggest a basic guideline on how to define and identify excellent university students in more general settings.
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