Sitti Hardiyanti Arhas, Arismunandar, Sirajuddin Saleh, Muhammad Ardiansyah
Higher education institutions face increasing pressure to enhance teaching quality, student learning, curriculum responsiveness, and institutional accountability through effective internal quality assurance (IQA) systems. Although participatory approaches to IQA have attracted growing scholarly attention, evidence remains fragmented across research on quality culture, leadership, stakeholder engagement, governance, and academic development. Consequently, limited understanding exists regarding the mechanisms through which participatory IQA contributes to teaching-learning enhancement. This study systematically reviews international research examining how participatory IQA supports educational improvement in higher education. Guided by PRISMA 2020 procedures, the review synthesized evidence from 72 peer-reviewed studies published between 2014 and 2025 and indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, and ScienceDirect. Data were analyzed using interpretive thematic synthesis to identify recurring patterns, enabling conditions, and outcomes associated with participatory quality assurance practices. The findings indicate that participatory IQA supports curriculum enhancement, assessment improvement, pedagogical innovation, reflective teaching practice, faculty professional learning, and student engagement. Distributed leadership emerged as a critical enabling condition for meaningful stakeholder participation, while quality culture functioned as the central mechanism linking participation to continuous improvement and teaching-learning enhancement. However, managerialism, compliance-oriented accountability systems, symbolic participation, workload pressures, and resource constraints frequently limited authentic engagement in quality processes. The study refines a Participatory Quality Culture Framework that explains how distributed leadership enables stakeholder participation, participation strengthens collaborative quality cultures, and quality culture supports educational enhancement and organisational learning. By integrating insights from quality culture, participatory governance, distributed leadership, and academic development scholarship, the review repositions participatory IQA as an enhancement-oriented process of institutional learning rather than solely an administrative accountability mechanism. The findings highlight the importance of collaboration, trust, reflective practice, and shared responsibility in sustaining educational quality and continuous improvement in higher education. © 2026, University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved.
Universitas Negeri Makassar, Gunung Sari Campus, Indonesia
