Evaluation is an integral component of assuring and enhancing the quality of instruction in higher education. With new formats emerging, such as cross-reality laboratories, comprehensive evaluation becomes increasingly more challenging due to the technology-mediated nature of these laboratory experiments. Therefore, a survey grounded in established instructional design frameworks was developed and subject to validation.

Constructive Alignment (1) is fundamental for the instructional design of laboratory experiments and for facilitating learning. Another design framework addressing learning efficacy includes the dimensions of effectiveness, efficiency and appeal (2). As student evaluations cannot depict objective effectiveness and efficiency, their perceived equivalents were operationalised.

The survey design is informed by the work of (3). Items representing and operationalising the instructional design concepts were developed collaboratively within a project by educators, professors and student assistants to incorporate multiple perspectives. For validation purposes, some items were worded positively while others were worded negatively. Moreover, alternative wordings for similar items were used to examine not only internal consistency in student responses but also to find the optimal wordings.

Face validity was ensured by ratings provided by other laboratory instructors, STEM students and the project’s advisory board. An initial pre-test was conducted to identify items with excessive similarity to decrease the overall number of questions prior to validation. This resulted in 53 items rated on an 11-point Likert-Scale. The survey was deployed in eight cross-reality laboratories at three universities collecting 222 unique responses.

A confirmatory factor analysis (4) demonstrated that the assumed survey structure comprising the four design principles couldn’t be replicated from the students’ perspective.

To further investigate the underlying structure, an exploratory factor analysis (5) was conducted employing principal axis factoring with an oblique rotation as correlations between factors were expected. The analysis converged to a core set of eight items creating two factors stable across various types of technological mediation and STEM disciplines. On factor comprised of five items related to intended learning outcomes, including their clarity, comprehensibility and students’ awareness of them. The dimension of appeal was reduced to three items capturing whether the experience was enjoyable and whether it motivated students to continue engaging with the subject matter; essentially, the motivation to keep on learning.

Interestingly, items evaluating the teaching learning activities, assessment tasks and their interrelation with another and the intended learning outcomes were eliminated from the structure. This suggests that these items do not contribute to explaining an underlying factor. This implies that these dimensions are not actively perceived or reflected upon by students conducting laboratories. This may be due to the students spending their cognitive capacities reflecting on the laboratories’ content and their experimental methodology, rather than reflecting on whether the instructional design facilitated learning. Therefore, Constructive Alignment remains largely opaque to students, while transparency and awareness of intended learning outcomes served as an easily perceivable proxy for Constructive Alignment as a whole.

Furthermore, the line between perceived effectiveness and perceived efficiency appears to be blurred. This is probably due to the students always learning something new or enhancing a particular skill, thereby ensuring effectiveness. When combined with the tight time slots for experimentation, these learning experiences are always somewhat efficient. These perceptions are closely linked to the teaching learning activities which are in turn are intrinsically connected to the assessment tasks. Consequently, students do not perceive effectiveness, efficiency and Constructive Alignment as distinct dimensions.

These findings raise the question of how evaluation instruments should be designed to meaningfully assess instructional design quality and to signal educators’ competence and commitment to improving their teaching.

One implication is that comprehensive surveys encompassing multiple complex and distinct but related concepts at a broad level may result in an instrument capturing only the lowest common denominator and thus yielding completeness at the expense of specificity and depth. Instead, evaluations could adopt several modular survey designs that focus on a single construct at a time. Additionally, incorporating complementary data sources such as pre-post-test designs, learning analytics or student reflections or interviews can provide richer perspectives beyond surveys with ratings and qualitative open-ended questions.

Finally, it should be noted that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. These instructional frameworks remain highly valuable for instructional design.

The paper analyses and compares the views and experiences of scholarship-sponsored master’s alumni with funding from their home countries – Mexico and Indonesia – who studied in Sweden between 2013–2020. Utilizing approaches from the toolbox of the Economics and Sociology of Conventions (EC/SC), It examines nineteen alumni’s valuation processes and contestations relative to their sponsoring organizations and the universities they attended. Interview findings reflect that these sponsored students’ valuation of their education differs markedly from that of sponsoring organizations. The policies and approaches employed by the scholarship programs are highlighted in light of these findings. Further analysis examines tensions and delineates incoherence, uncertainty and contestation related to return migration and the useful utilization of knowledge. The comparative analysis highlights the importance of societal conventions around “return”. Instances of non-return, and “frustrated return” amongst alumni are underscored. The discussion considers tensions and ethical challenges amidst scholarship programs’ attempts to demonstrate their awardees’ contribution towards a domestic common good. With these findings, this paper joins a chorus of other recent research calling for more sophisticated evaluation approaches to these programs, whose justifications currently rest on untestable human capital rationale.

In 1990, the Council of Europe recognised education as a fundamental right for individuals in detention, advocating for parity with education available outside prison. Yet, more than three decades later, significant disparities remain in the accessibility, quality, and impact of educational opportunities in prisons compared to those offered in the wider community (Costelloe & Warner, 2014). In particular at the postsecondary level, European countries provide only limited opportunities for individuals in detention (EADTU, 2022). While the exact number of prison-university partnerships (PUPs) in Europe remains unclear, more than 400 PUPs have been documented in the United States (National Directory of Higher Education in Prison Programs, 2023). This greater transparency in the US is also reflected in a larger body of research and evaluations of these programmes, providing more evidence on their effectiveness and impact.

According to a systematic review conducted by Castro and Lerman (2025), however, most studies evaluating higher education programmes in US prisons focus on recidivism rates as the primary metric of success. The research on this topic is clear: the available evidence demonstrates that providing educational opportunities in prison substantially reduces recidivism rates (Bozick et al., 2018). Nevertheless, education is expected to encompass a wider range of dimensions, including personal growth, agency, critical awareness, and the promotion of social justice (Castro & Gould, 2019; Coon, 2023).

Therefore, there is currently little evidence on the various ways in which PUPs affect learners in prison. A narrow focus on prison education as correctional intervention rather than academic opportunity makes it difficult to situate these programmes within the broader discussion of postsecondary educational pedagogy and outcomes. Moreover, measuring the effectiveness of college programmes in prisons solely through recidivism rates, risks reducing education to a means of behavioural correction, thereby overlooking its broader potential to drive personal and societal transformation (Conway, 2020; Lerman & Sadin, 2022; Lewen, 2014).

Through a systematic review (Patton, 2015; Scriven, 2002), this study will critically map and examine the epistemological foundations, methodological approaches, and normative assumptions underlying research evaluating higher education programmes in prison, including evaluations that go beyond recidivism. To identify the prevailing approaches, concepts and assumptions currently informing evaluation practices and to highlight evaluations extending beyond a narrow focus on recidivism, it will begin with a comprehensive assessment of the dominant evaluative rationales underpinning literature. To this end, it draws on peer-reviewed articles accessed through Scopus (one of the largest multidisciplinary citation databases), ERIC (a key source for educational research), and EBSCOhost (a major platform for full-text scholarly databases). Contrasting evaluations of PUPs with those of traditional higher education programmes will highlight the ideological and institutional differences that shape educational priorities in carceral contexts, providing a thorough overview of existing PUP evaluation practices. In this way, this research aims to leverage PUPs that resemble those in the field of higher education research as a whole.