Mapping the Field of Educational Assessment and Professional Accreditation in Higher Education: Bibliographic Coupling and Co-Citation Analyses for Green and Digital Transformation

Evaluating effectiveness and impacts of higher education has been the central sites of observations for the field of educational assessment and professional accreditation, with various institutions providing accreditation services such as IEET, HEEACT, AACSB, ABET, etc. Given the advancement of digital technologies and digital economy applications, it is important to explore how such higher education evaluation can benefit from, and also account in, such digital advancement. In this paper, we conduct web crawling written in Python to systematically scan the Web of Science to retrieve the related literature. Based on 646 bibliographic data collected from the database, the findings show that the main contribution has been made by mostly the three main disciplines: science education, educational research, and engineering, the top journals such as International Journal of Engineering Education, the top keywords such as accreditation, assessment, quality assurance, outcomes, etc. The findings also reveal how such concerns have been discussed in relation to topics such as learning analytics, big data, sustainability, impacts, etc., that can be related to green and digital transformation. In conclusion, the overall mapping provides an initial roadmap for the practice of higher education assessment and accreditation to harness the potentials of digital technologies for green and digital transformation of higher education, including more inclusive notion of "impact" that includes sustainability and more human-centered notion of "outcomes" that focuses more on human development.