The study, published in SN Social Sciences, focused on two courses at the São Paulo Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology, Bragança Paulista campus: Mathematics Education and Technology in Systems Analysis and Development. These were chosen because they carry the campus’s highest dropout rates, at 69 percent and 54.9 percent respectively. Led by Karla Cristiny Moraes da Silva of the Federal University of São Carlos and the Federal Institute of São Paulo, together with Silvio Eduardo Alvarez Candido and Márcio Rogério Silva, the research distinguishes carefully between the observable event of dropout and the deeper structural process the authors call exclusion. A school system that formally admits students of all social origins, they argue, following Bourdieu and Passeron, may continue to exclude some of them from within, through a gradual process of elimination or self-elimination conditioned by each student’s position in the social space.

Methodologically, the study is notable for operationalizing a theoretical program that Bourdieu himself proposed but which has rarely been applied to dropout research. The team adopted a prosopographic approach, building standardized biographical records for former students covering social origin, family, schooling, occupation and assets. Data from the institution’s academic systems, Sistec and Suap, spanning eight years of enrollments from 2009 to 2017, were combined with an electronic survey that yielded 110 responses from alumni of the two courses. The researchers then applied Multiple Correspondence Analysis, or MCA, a geometric modelling technique designed to map the relative positions of individuals based on categorical variables, implemented in R with the FactoMineR package. Thirty categorical variables covering indicators of cultural and economic capital were fed into the model, which projects individuals onto a Cartesian plane where proximity expresses similarity in social properties.

The MCA revealed a striking structure. The vertical axis of the mapped social space was associated with economic capital and family structure, while the horizontal axis captured cultural capital and age. A subsequent cluster analysis, using hierarchical clustering on principal components with Ward’s criterion consolidated by a k-means step, sorted the respondents into four groups. The largest, 47 students, were labeled aspiring hardworkers: young people born in the 1990s, raised mostly by their biological parents, whose parents had basic-level occupations and whose own income, when they worked, was typically below two minimum wages. Cluster one, 36 students called older hardworkers, were born mostly before 1990, were often heads of household with dependents, supported themselves exclusively through their own labor, and came from large families with very low parental schooling; 68.4 percent had started working before turning 14.

The third cluster, 22 students from the middle and lower middle class, stood out for its relative affluence: higher family incomes, civil servant parents in occupations such as engineering, analysis and nursing, high rates of car ownership and even household help, and the highest proportion of students who had previously attended private schools. The fourth cluster, just five students classified as members of what Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza provocatively calls the rabble, came from small, single-parent families headed by mothers in low-status occupations, with family income below two minimum wages and no independent income of their own. Souza’s framework, which adapts Bourdieu to the Brazilian reality, distinguishes the upper class, the culturally endowed middle class, the new working class of hardworkers and the precarious working class, and it proved essential to interpreting the mapped positions.

The dropout figures attached to these clusters are the study’s most sobering result. Among survey respondents, the middle and lower middle class group had the lowest dropout rate, which was still 68.2 percent. The older hardworkers dropped out at a rate of 94.4 percent, the aspiring hardworkers at 85.1 percent, and not a single rabble student in the database completed the analyzed courses, a 100 percent exclusion rate. Only about 20 percent of the students analyzed belonged to the middle class. For the vast majority, these students were the first generation of their families to reach higher education, a position that imposed significant barriers to completion. The authors stress that these proportions describe their respondents rather than the full population, since the survey overrepresented non-completers and response rates were low, but the pattern within the sample is unmistakable.

To understand how these structural positions were lived and interpreted, the team conducted eleven in-depth interviews with alumni selected from the mapped clusters, coded through content analysis following Bardin’s method. The accounts illustrate how social position shaped both the meaning of higher education and the strategies for surviving it. Fabiano, the rabble student who left the systems analysis course, still considered it transformative, valuing the technical knowledge it gave him, but he found the academic load overwhelming and perceived a hidden, competitive dispute among classmates. He left when he judged he had already acquired what the job market required, an instrumental relationship with higher education that echoes Lehmann’s findings on working-class students. Today he works in the IT department of a bank, in what he calls his dream job.

Among the older hardworkers, only Eduarda finished her course, and her case proved pivotal. She was the only member of her family never encouraged to enter higher education, entering instead through a social project of popular courses, and she found the institute intimidating. What saved her was what the authors, following Kurantowicz and Nizinska, call relational retention practices: an extroverted temperament that let her build a study network of colleagues, and teachers who consistently helped her assimilate content, combined with student assistance that meant she did not have to work. The three excluded members of her cluster, despite family encouragement and technical backgrounds, reported difficulties relating to classmates and reconciling work with study, and they left when adverse circumstances accumulated. By contrast, the aspiring hardworkers and middle-class students completed their courses through more individualistic, biographical retention strategies, confident in their ability to learn autonomously, with completion so naturalized in their families that parental encouragement barely featured in their accounts. Two middle-class interviewees, Hélio and Gabriela, displayed such freedom of choice that they left the institute over course indecision, one graduating in arts and the other moving to distance learning.

The findings also expose an uncomfortable mismatch in Brazilian inclusion policy. Affirmative action quotas reached 40 percent of the rabble cluster and 23.4 percent of aspiring hardworkers, but only 6.7 percent of the older hardworkers, the group with the second-highest exclusion rate, partly because the quota law was phased in from 2013 and many older students had already enrolled. The authors suggest that criteria based on school type, income and race may fail to capture properties such as age, employment and family structure that define these students’ disadvantage. Student assistance scholarships, by contrast, were distributed fairly across the vulnerable clusters. The study proposes four hypotheses for policy design: inclusion criteria that reflect the multidimensional structure of disadvantage revealed by the MCA; retention support targeted at the highest-risk positions, including flexible schedules and academic preparation for older working students; structured opportunities for peer study groups and mentoring rather than leaving supportive relationships to chance; and the use of administrative systems institutions already maintain, such as Sistec and Suap, to build relational maps identifying at-risk students at entry.

Beyond its immediate policy implications, the research makes a methodological argument with reach across the Global South, where the late-2000s expansion of public higher education in Brazil brought first-generation, often older and working students into institutions designed for more privileged groups. By combining geometric data analysis with interviews, the study reads students’ position-takings against the structure that conditions them, showing that the encounter between the habitus of disadvantaged students and the institutional habitus of a demanding academy generates a generalized hysteresis, a lag between inherited dispositions and new conditions, that students experience not as arbitrariness but as personal failure. The Brazilian data also confirmed Souza’s thesis that family structure functions as a kind of family capital in the lowest social classes, a property that should complement Bourdieu’s original forms of capital in analyses of deeply unequal societies. The authors are careful about the limits of their claims: the analysis is descriptive rather than causal, covers two courses on one campus, and the smallest cluster supports only tentative readings. Yet the core insight travels well beyond Bragança Paulista. Dropout, they show, is rarely a free choice. It is the visible end of a chain of positions, capitals and family configurations that societies themselves have built, and only by recognizing that structure can institutions begin to dismantle it.

Subject of Research: Social determinants of dropout and exclusion from higher professional education in Brazil

Article Title: Relational structures of exclusion of higher professional education in Brazil: culture, money and family

Article References: da Silva, K. C. M., Candido, S. E. A., & Silva, M. R. (2026). Relational structures of exclusion of higher professional education in Brazil: culture, money and family. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 525. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01830-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01830-w

Keywords: higher education, dropout, social inequality, Bourdieu, Brazil, Multiple Correspondence Analysis, cultural capital, family structure, Federal Institutes, first-generation students, affirmative action, sociology of education

The study is grounded in a long intellectual tradition. Sociologists from Ibn Khaldun to Montesquieu speculated about the relationship between climate and social organization, and modern researchers have built an increasingly rigorous evidence base on the topic. Econometric studies have shown that extreme weather events reduce schooling and educational attainment in settings as varied as Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the global tropics. Research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that heat exposure inhibits learning both internationally and within the United States, with each additional hot school day measurably reducing achievement. Laboratory work in ergonomics has demonstrated that both hot and cold temperature exposure degrade human performance, while building science has documented how classroom air quality and thermal comfort affect students’ subjective perception, physiological responses, and learning outcomes. What has been missing, the Turkish authors contend, is a fine-grained sociological account of how these forces play out inside actual schools, in the words of the people who inhabit them every day.

To fill that gap, Gürbüz and Sever designed a qualitative study using a phenomenological approach, a method that seeks to capture the essence of lived experience rather than to measure variables statistically. They deliberately chose two contrasting provinces. Ağrı, in eastern Turkey, is defined by a cold, continental climate with long, harsh winters in which temperatures routinely plunge far below freezing. Siirt, in the country’s southeast, endures a hot climate in which late spring and summer bring punishing heat. The comparison allowed the researchers to ask whether the same underlying mechanism, the interaction between climate and educational practice, manifests differently under opposite thermal regimes.

The research group comprised 82 participants: 27 students, 27 teachers, and 28 school administrators drawn from schools across both provinces. Participants were selected through maximum diversity sampling, an intentional strategy designed to capture as wide a range of perspectives and circumstances as possible rather than to produce a statistically representative sample. Data collection and analysis followed established interpretative phenomenological procedures, and the study received ethics approval from Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The findings were then organized around three intersecting contexts that the authors identified as the main channels through which climate reaches the classroom: the sociocultural, the economic, and the educational.

The sociocultural channel proved to be among the most striking. In Ağrı, the long winter season reshapes the rhythm of social and family life, and with it the rhythm of schooling. Snow, ice, and extreme cold affect student attendance, complicate journeys to and from school, and restrict outdoor activity during breaks, a problem that connects to broader research showing that season and weather strongly influence physical activity levels. In Siirt, the equivalent disruption arrives with the heat. As air temperatures climb in late spring and summer, the study found that negative effects on educational practices intensified, echoing earlier work in Şanlıurfa, another hot Turkish province, which documented how climate characteristics affect the learning and teaching performance of secondary school students and teachers. In both cases, the climate does not merely make people uncomfortable; it restructures the social conditions under which education takes place.

The economic channel operates through family livelihoods and school resources. Seasonal agricultural labor, a well-documented feature of rural Turkey, pulls children out of school during certain periods of the year, and the timing of that labor is itself dictated by climate. Weather-dependent work patterns shape when families can afford to prioritize schooling and when economic necessity wins. At the institutional level, schools in both provinces were found to be vulnerable to climate impacts and, in the authors’ assessment, weak in terms of climate interaction, meaning that school buildings and routines had not been designed with regional climatic conditions in mind. This vulnerability was most severe in schools constructed without consideration of local climate, where problems multiplied.

The educational channel is the most direct. The study found that hot and cold weather conditions had a more negative impact on educational practices than cloudy, windy, or rainy conditions did. Extreme temperatures interfere with concentration, lesson pacing, the scheduling of the school year, and the physical usability of classrooms and schoolyards. In Ağrı, educational practices were more negatively affected overall, because the extended winter season prolongs exposure to disruptive cold. In Siirt, the damage was concentrated in the hottest months, when overheated classrooms undermine the very conditions learning requires. These findings align closely with the international quantitative literature: a meta-analytic review of temperature and performance found that both heat and cold degrade task performance, and studies of school buildings in cold climates, from Russia to China, have emphasized the importance of thermal design for educational quality.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that climate is not simply a background variable but an active participant in the social institution of education. The authors frame their work within ecological models of human development, in which children’s growth is understood as nested within overlapping environmental systems, from the family to the school to the broader culture and physical environment. Seen through this lens, a snowed-in road or an unventilated classroom is not an inconvenience at the margins of education; it is part of the ecological structure that determines what schooling can actually deliver. The research also resonates with historical evidence: an analysis of school logbooks from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed that extreme weather repeatedly disrupted schooling and exposed social vulnerabilities that persist in different forms today.

The policy implications are straightforward but consequential. The authors recommend that regional climatic conditions be taken into account when establishing educational programs and institutions, in order to safeguard the quality of education. In practice, that means school calendars that reflect local seasonal realities, building codes and architectural standards suited to cold or hot climates, investment in heating, insulation, and ventilation where they are most needed, and curricula and scheduling decisions that anticipate the disruptions that weather reliably brings. As climate change intensifies heat extremes and weather volatility across the globe, the study suggests that educational planners can no longer treat climate as a fixed given. The classrooms of the future, the research implies, will succeed or fail in part on how well societies learn to design education around the atmosphere that surrounds them.

Subject of Research: The interaction between regional climate conditions and educational practices in schools

Article Title: A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate

Article References: Gürbüz, M., & Sever, M. (2026). A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 449. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Keywords: climate, education, sociology of education, qualitative research, phenomenology, school buildings, heat exposure, cold climate, Turkey, student attendance, educational attainment, school policy

The review, published online on August 1, 2026, in ECNU Review of Education, was conducted by Luís Miguel Carvalho and Catarina Gonçalves of the Institute of Education, University of Lisbon. The authors examined 42 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2023, mapping a body of work known as the sociology of policy instruments in education. Their goal was twofold: to take stock of what this research tradition has revealed about contemporary education policy, and to identify where the field should go next. The result is both a synthesis of nearly two decades of scholarship and a framework for understanding how apparently mundane administrative devices carry profound political weight.

The intellectual core of the sociology of policy instruments is the claim that instruments are simultaneously technical and social devices. Legislation, contracts, assessments, benchmarks, indicators, funding mechanisms, and communication platforms all embody specific values and assumptions about the relationship between government, education professionals, learners, and society. A national testing regime, for instance, encodes beliefs about what knowledge matters, how learning should be demonstrated, and who is entitled to judge school quality. A funding contract encodes assumptions about incentives and accountability. Studying these embedded assumptions, the review argues, makes it possible to see how power operates through arrangements that are usually presented as merely practical.

The literature reviewed shows a clear center of gravity. Researchers have concentrated especially on performance-based instruments: the OECD’s PISA assessments, national large-scale assessments, school evaluation and self-evaluation schemes, indicators, standards, and accreditation procedures. This concentration, the authors suggest, reflects a broader transformation in how education systems are governed—a shift toward governance through comparison, data, and performance-oriented accountability. In such systems, the instrument is not an afterthought to policy; it is the medium through which policy is imagined, debated, and enforced.

The review also documents a second trend in the research: growing attention to European education governance, to global intergovernmental organizations, to private companies, and to intermediary actors who work between national policy and local practice. This shift mirrors changes in the policy landscape itself. As international assessments and transnational benchmarks gain influence, the actors who design, interpret, and circulate these tools—organizations, consultants, data providers, and broker institutions—acquire authority that traditional accounts of education policy rarely captured. Instrument-based research, the review shows, is particularly well suited to illuminating this redistribution of influence.

To organize the existing knowledge, Carvalho and Gonçalves distinguish three dimensions. The first concerns the institutional ideas embedded in instruments—the values, theories of schooling, and assumptions about governance that tools carry within them. The second concerns the trajectories instruments follow as they are designed, adopted, and used in practice. The third concerns the effects instruments generate once they are in circulation. Crucially, the review emphasizes, instruments do not simply travel unchanged from policymaking centers to schools. National traditions, political interests, professional identities, and local conditions can lead to adoption, opposition, hybridization, or the creation of entirely new tools. A similar assessment or indicator scheme may therefore take quite different forms in different systems, depending on the institutional soil in which it is planted.

From this synthesis, the authors distill six recurring effects of policy instruments. Instruments can legitimize certain actors and coalitions while marginalizing others. They can reorganize political spaces and timelines, changing who participates in decision-making and on what schedule. They can privilege certain forms of knowledge and expertise over others, elevating statistical and managerial competence in the process. They can gather actors around common issues, creating new arenas of cooperation and contestation. They can produce hybrid policies when several tools and governing logics interact within the same system. And they can generate unintended consequences that no designer anticipated.

The review offers concrete illustrations of these dynamics. Comparative assessments such as PISA may strengthen the authority of international organizations and structure national debate around rankings and league tables. Indicators designed to inform policy deliberation can harden into simplified rankings that obscure the complexity they were meant to capture. Performance tools introduced to encourage innovation may instead intensify supervision or standardize classroom practice. In each case, the effect flows not from malice or error but from the way the instrument itself organizes attention, incentives, and authority—a reminder that design choices are consequential even when they appear innocuous.

“Studies on policy instruments are well suited to address the complexity of education policy: the multiple policy scales as interdependent contexts, the variety of individual and collective actors involved, and the various governance patterns, ranging from state-oriented to market-oriented regimes, and from norm-based governance patterns to performance-oriented ones,” said Carvalho and Gonçalves. The methodological strength of this approach lies precisely in its capacity to connect levels: a single testing regime can be analyzed simultaneously as a national political project, a transnational data infrastructure, a professional constraint on teachers, and a market opportunity for private providers. Few other lenses in education research hold these scales together so naturally.

The review is candid about its limits and the gaps it exposes. The evidence base remains strongly centered on Europe, leaving large regions of the world underrepresented in the literature. Researchers have also paid less attention to combinations of multiple instruments, even though real education systems almost always deploy tools in bundles rather than in isolation. The authors call for a broader geo-cultural range of studies, clearer theoretical foundations, and more systematic explanations of why the same instrument follows different trajectories in different settings. Answering these calls, they suggest, would turn a promising research perspective into a genuinely comparative science of educational governance.

For policymakers and education leaders, the findings carry a practical caution: choosing a policy instrument is itself a political decision. A test, an indicator, a contract, or a digital platform may affect not only whether a policy achieves its stated goals, but also what goals appear legitimate in the first place, who gains authority over schools, and which realities remain visible or become obscured by the data collected. A ministry that selects a new evaluation framework is, in effect, redrawing the map of who may speak credibly about education. Recognizing this does not mean abandoning instruments—governance without tools is impossible—but it does mean treating their selection and design as matters requiring the same scrutiny as policy content itself.

For researchers, the review provides a map of a developing field and a framework for examining the complex links between technical devices, institutional change, and power in education. The sociology of policy instruments, as synthesized by Carvalho and Gonçalves, invites scholars to ask deceptively simple questions about the tools that surround schooling: What ideas do they carry? Whose interests do they serve? How do they travel, mutate, and combine? And what worlds do they make possible—or foreclose? As education systems worldwide continue to embrace data, comparison, and performance, those questions grow only more urgent, and the instruments themselves grow only more consequential.

Subject of Research: The role of policy instruments in shaping ideas, actors, and governance in education policy

Article Title: Policy instruments are never neutral — they shape ideas, actors, and change

Article References: Policy instruments are never neutral — they shape ideas, actors, and change. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: education policy, policy instruments, scoping review, PISA, accountability, governance, indicators, school evaluation, Europeanization, international organizations, performance governance, sociology of education

The study, conducted by Marie Larsen Ryberg of the University of Copenhagen and Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen of Copenhagen Business School, draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork across a university-wide initiative to integrate research into teaching. The first author observed seven courses spanning the natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences, humanities and law, part of a larger project in which 54 courses were redesigned to connect research and teaching more closely. Through participant observation, ethnographic interviews during group work sessions, semi-structured interviews with teachers and focus group interviews with students, the researchers captured how academics and students experienced the relationship between research-based teaching processes and final assessment. What emerged was a consistent story of two incompatible ways of engaging colliding within the same course.

To interpret these experiences, the researchers turned to the sociology of regimes of engagement, a theoretical framework developed by French sociologist Laurent Thévenot. The framework distinguishes four ways humans engage with their surroundings: justification, planned action, familiarity and exploration. Each regime carries its own benefit, or good, and each requires a specific environment to support it. The regime of planned action offers the satisfaction of successfully executing a plan, projecting oneself into the future and working purposefully toward predetermined outcomes. This regime has become so pervasive in contemporary society that it can easily be mistaken for normal action, and it has been institutionalised in education through quality assurance systems and standardised assessment. The regime of exploration, by contrast, promises not certainty but the excitement of discovering the new, thriving on surprise and the pursuit of the unknown.

Across the courses studied, exams consistently emerged as a site of difficulty. Academics repeatedly identified examinations as unwelcome intrusions into processes where students were expected to engage in genuine research. Three food science professors who deliberately designed their course as an exam-free experiment explained that the main idea was for students to try collecting data, and that this would not work if students were told to act as students all the time, concerned with marks and passing. A laboratory science professor omitted standard examinations from her course design, noting in an evaluation report that preparing for exams may become the dominating goal, restricting creativity. In a social sciences course, a professor told inquiring students that exams were not what interested him most, and that the course was really about learning.

Teachers did not merely talk differently about assessment; they actively shaped their learning environments to invite exploration. In a law course, a professor opened the first seminar with an invigorating talk about the experimental status of the course itself, emphasising her hopes of creating more knowledge and perhaps changing attitudes, and encouraging an experimental and inspirational milieu. Even in a health sciences class of approximately 300 students conducting laboratory experiments, teachers cultivated excitement by emphasising that student work would contribute to a larger experiment. Students responded vividly to these atmospheres. One law student observed that in this course it felt more like people wanted to ask questions and be inspired, contrasting it with the normal programme where it is like your whole life depends on getting a high mark. Another student in a social sciences course said that unlike other courses, where considerable energy goes into deciphering learning goals and exam requirements, in this course you do not feel like you are thinking about the performance at all.

Yet these carefully composed atmospheres proved fragile. A humanities professor who had run weekly videoconference seminars with international researchers described how the sessions evolved into an ongoing conversation that students found extremely interesting, only for the atmosphere to deteriorate as the exam approached. Students started talking about the required number of words, and the professor concluded that the exam had been a tripwire and a disturbance. Students described similar dissonance. One student in a social sciences course recounted that when the exam period arrived, he had to make a plan but found it very unclear what was expected, describing a clash between the professor and the rigid system. Through the lens of engagement regimes, these moments reveal what happens when an environment built to sustain explorative engagement is confronted by institutional formats that invite planned action and strategised effort.

The analysis also exposes what is sacrificed when one regime dominates. When exploration prevails, students lose the certainty of executing a plan and the sense of fairness that standardised assessment promises. Standard exams embody established quality conventions linked to the regime of justification, guaranteeing justice through clear learning goals and institutional formats. Suspending students’ concern with evaluation therefore produces not only freedom but also confusion about assessment expectations and worry about being judged justly. Conversely, when planned action dominates, the excitement of discovery is sacrificed, and open inquiry gives way to surface strategies aimed at meeting predefined criteria. Neither arrangement is neutral; each delivers distinct goods while imposing distinct losses on the individuals navigating them.

Some teachers, however, demonstrated what Thévenot calls an art of composition: the skilful coordination between competing engagement regimes. In a biochemistry course, a professor replaced traditional exams with a comprehensive portfolio assessment in which students could pass through attendance and three presentations. Fourth-year students worked in groups on research projects in the teaching lab three days a week, presented findings to each other and to departmental colleagues in poster sessions, submitted a podcast documenting their process, and published their findings in a journal report. The professor explained that the team focused on evaluation relevant to a real research environment, where scientists present results to peers and reviewers and ideas are tested in broader settings. Students described the course as exciting and different, with one reflecting that because there was no exam, they were not thinking that they had nothing to show, even though the experiment had not gone as expected, because it had been a learning process in its own right.

Even this artful solution involved sacrifice. The portfolio format protected exploration and created sheltered moments for imagination, but it partially deprived students of the possibility of organising their work through transparent, predefined goals. Outcomes were not foreseeable, and some students threw themselves on the floor when experiments failed, while others said they had never felt so nervous. Because the environment was dominated by the expectation of discovering something new, students could reframe what would have counted as failure under planned action as genuine learning, but the underlying tension did not dissolve. The theory suggests that every compromise between engagement regimes necessarily sacrifices the good of one mode of engagement, leaving a residual strain that teachers must continually manage rather than permanently resolve.

The authors argue that these findings carry implications far beyond local assessment design. The clash between open-ended inquiry and standardised evaluation reflects the coexistence in modern universities of environments that dispose fundamentally different ways of engaging, each with distinct benefits and losses. A Humboldtian ideal of knowledge as perpetually unresolved sits alongside an equally enduring conception of learning as predictable and manageable, and research-based teaching sits precisely at this fault line. Strengthening the integration of research and teaching, the study contends, requires recognising the tensions between plural engagement regimes rather than treating assessment problems as technical alignment failures. Supporting educational quality, the researchers conclude, demands institutional environments that enable rather than constrain the delicate compositional work teachers and students undertake, treating shifts between exploration and assessment as tensions to compose around rather than perplexing surprises. The predicament of assessment in research-based teaching is therefore not a problem to be solved once and for all, but a perpetual challenge calling for continuous recognition and recomposition.

Subject of Research: Tensions between research-based teaching and standardised university assessment viewed through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Article Title: Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Article References: Ryberg, M. L., & Carlsen, M. H. (2026). Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01765-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01765-4

Keywords: research-based teaching, assessment, regimes of engagement, exploration, planned action, higher education, ethnography, student engagement, university pedagogy, Humboldtian ideal, portfolio assessment, sociology of education