ABSTRACT
This book provides connections between several existing bodies of research, including demographic studies of faculty, organizational and cultural analyses, research on teaching methods and policies for the assessment of instruction. This chapter explores the existing literature within each of these categories, and identifies the relationship between them and the focus of this analysis. Research studies in these categories combine to form a comprehensive look at who academics are, what they do, and the social and cultural contexts in which they do it. In summarizing these studies, it is observed that an international perspective is particularly absent from existing literature on teaching and learning in higher education. This study is thus intended to help fill the void left by the lack of a cross-national or cross-cultural perspective on this important topic.
