Research On Third-party Evaluation Of Higher Vocational Education Quality

Evaluation has become an effective mean and an important part of the higher vocational education quality guarantee system of our country in the Post Massification Era when higher vocational education shifts from scale expansion to connotative development.Higher vocational education quality evaluation of our country has been implemented mainly by the Ministry of Education for a very long time.However,since this kind of education evaluation model is leaded by education administrative department who acts as both “athlete” and “judge”,fairness and effectiveness of its evaluation has been questioned by all walks of life.Therefore,a third-party evaluation model originated from western society begins to seep into the field of higher vocational education gradually under the background of booming of higher vocational colleges,failure of government's intervention in education and growing appeal of the public to participate in educational governance.However,such third-party evaluation model is exotic after all.Even though lots of researches and discussions on what is third-party evaluation and why evaluation should be conducted by third party at the macroscopic level have been made in the domestic academic circles,there are less researches focusing on how third party conducts evaluation,what kind of philosophy third party should uphold when carrying out such evaluation,how its evaluation subject should be formed,how its evaluation process is organized and designed and how the development of third-party evaluation agencies is guaranteed through laws and systems from the microscopic aspect.For this reason,based on the empirical studies fully made on third-party evaluation on higher vocational education quality at the national level,higher vocational education quality evaluation of XX City(region)at the mesoscopic level and evaluation on teaching quality of XXX higher vocational school at the microscopic level respectively,this paper has systematically studied the concept,subject,process,institutional guarantee,etc.of third-party evaluation on higher vocational education quality by adopting literature research,theoretical analysis,open-ended and semi-structured interviews and other methods,and has made an in-depth study and design on the ought-to-be model of the third-party quality evaluation system of higher vocational education of our country by taking the fourth generation evaluation theory,governance theory and the principal-agent theory of new institutional economics as theoretical references.First of all,at the conceptual level,this paper has analyzed and compared the concepts of administrative evaluation and third-party evaluation and believes that higher vocational education quality evaluation leaded by administrative department is still upholding the static concept of the planned economy period.Static evaluation concept mainly characterizes static state of evaluation process,evaluation standards and evaluation purposes.To be specific,first,static evaluation process only includes two links,ie.self-evaluation of higher vocational colleges and field visit of evaluation group as an agent of government,and lacks post-evaluation tracking and monitoring;limitation of static evaluation concept is that it pays too much attention to the generative result of the evaluation while neglects the rectification implemented based on evaluation conclusion and feedback and lacks a long-lasting quality supervision and guarantee mechanism;second,static state of evaluation standards is manifested as stereotype and rigidification of indexes,which means that a set of stereotypical standards is always used to measure many schools varied in school history,conditions and geographical distribution and thus the evaluation thereof is not quite fair.Compared with administrative evaluation,third-party evaluation on higher vocational education quality takes the fourth generation evaluation theory as a reference and adheres to dynamic evaluation concepts which include dynamic state of evaluation objectives,contents,methods and process.Dynamic state of evaluation objectives means that objective concept design transfers from judgment of advantages and disadvantages to diagnosis and improvement;dynamic state of subject concept refers to that multiple governance is in place;dynamic state of evaluation contents means thatparameters and indexes are constructed through cooperation with stakeholders,other than one-way system;dynamic state of evaluation process means that attention is paid to evaluation result,but more emphasis is laid on result-based diagnosis and improvement,to monitor and measure the higher vocational education quality with concepts of monitoring and give feedback in time.Second,at the subject level,Article 44 of the Higher Education Law of the People's Republic of China promulgated by the State Council in 1998 specifies that“Levels of running a school and educational quality of agencies of higher learning shall be subject to the supervision of departments of education administration and the evaluation organized by them.” This law has determined the leading position of education administrative departments in the higher education evaluation work.After that,this idea is further defined in such laws and regulations as the Vocational Education Law and Several Opinions of the Ministry of Education on Overall Improvement of Teaching Quality of Higher Vocational Education.Hence,such government-dominant education evaluation model has long existed in our country.Main manifestations: first,in the aspect of organizational leadership,the Ministry of Education establishes a leading group for supervision and evaluation of higher vocational education to take charge of the planning and coordination of higher vocational education evaluation work of the whole country;second,selection and employment of evaluation experts are uniformly organized by education administrative departments;third,in the aspect of application of evaluation results,evaluation results are mainly provided to the administrative departments in charge of education for decision making.To be specific,evaluation results are the references for policy formulation,planning and adjustment of supply and demand and also the basis for increase and decrease of higher vocational education budgets.Other nongovernmental sectors' participation in higher vocational education governance is very limited.Third-party evaluation agencies are roughly divided into government-dominated,non-government-dominated and peer-dominated types in the world.Government-dominated type,such as Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education of UK,is an independent quality evaluation institution for higher education and its members mainly come from institutions of higher education and social professionals,and its tenet is to evaluate educational performance of schools and alsoprovide objective information for governments to allocate funds;non-government-dominated type,such as Council on Postsecondary Accreditation of USA,is responsible for accreditation of institutions and curriculums;there are academic evaluation,review and accreditation associations of related majors,such as academic evaluation,review and accreditation associations of tourism major and higher education evaluation committees in various regions of USA;peer-dominated type includes peer organizations of Netherlands where a set of unique higher educational quality guarantee system is developed due to the characteristics of its higher education system;analyzing from the perspective of stakeholders,the third-party evaluation agencies for higher vocational education quality of Netherlands mainly include two evaluation subjects,i.e.NVAO,an organization responsible for higher education curriculum accreditation,and VBIs,a peer organization responsible for external peer evaluation work,both of which are independent of governments and higher vocational colleges and aim at improving higher vocational education quality.In China,education evaluation agencies are also classified into government-dominated type such as Shanghai Education Evaluation Institute,non-government-dominated type such as MYCOS,and semi-governmental type such as Yunnan Higher Education Evaluation Institute,etc.No matter what type of evaluation agency it is,with the fourth generation evaluation theory as reference,third-party evaluation advocates pluralism of subjects and values,defines students,teachers,employers,senior technicians and communities as stakeholders who construct evaluation standards with evaluators through negotiation,and ensures the democracy and value pluralism of the evaluation process by taking hermeneutic circle dialectics and investigation methodology of naturalism as the basic dialectics for continuous construction.Furthermore,in the aspect of process,through investigation and survey,this paper believes that administrative evaluation of our country implements multilevel education vertical management system and its evaluation mechanism is that entrustment passes from governments at higher level to those at lower level gradually.In general,evaluation is initiated by the Ministry of Education and passed through provincial and municipal education administrative departments to all higher vocational colleges.Provincial education administrative department will organize an expert group to visit schools for interview and comparison of talent cultivation work status dataplatforms of higher vocational colleges and review on the materials submitted by the colleges.The expert group will discuss with the evaluated colleges and its superior competent department and then submit evaluation conclusion and work report to the provincial evaluation committee.Finally,the provincial education administrative department approves the evaluation conclusion and then announce to the public.Principal-agent theory of new institutional economics holds that this kind of evaluation mechanism where government's entrustment is passed to various levels gradually not just extends the evaluation management chain,but also increases institutional transaction costs.If the principal cannot completely supervise the behaviors of the agent,the agent will not work hard as expected by the principal.When both the principal and the agent seek for respective maximum benefits,interest conflict will be induced between the principal(government)and the agent(higher vocational college)as their utility functions are different.In the evaluation process of higher vocational education of our country,this kind of conflict is embodied in arising of opportunism and formalism.For this reason,higher vocational education evaluation and management mechanism is extensively criticized and questioned by the society.However,third-party evaluation agencies can accept entrustment of schools and governments and carry out evaluation in a capacity independent of schools and governments.To a certain extent,agencies and schools are equal and there is no such relation of leading and being led.For its sustainable development,third-party evaluation agencies will ensure the scientificity,independence and fairness of evaluation conclusions.Finally,at the institutional level,through comparing the development experience of developed countries in third-party evaluation on higher education quality and studying the current situation of third-party evaluation on higher education quality of our country,this paper believes that many problems exist in the third-party evaluation on higher vocational education quality of our country,such as low level of independence,insufficiency of authority and lack of competitiveness.Through empirical research and analysis on the causes of those problems,such as administrative offside of government,constraint of higher vocational education evaluation and management system,lack of institutional guarantee,exclusion of traditional culture and loss of meta-evaluation mechanism,this paper puts forward a way for third-party evaluation on highervocational education quality of our country that guarantee can be provided based on government,society,agency and academy.Government-based guarantee can be realized by formulating laws to guarantee the position of third-party evaluation,establishing qualification authentication system for third-party evaluation agencies and self-discipline mechanism for third-party evaluation industry,etc.;society-based guarantee can optimize the operating environment of third-party evaluation agencies and it can be realized by creating a good policy atmosphere and cultivating sense and ability of participation of citizens;agency-based guarantee can be strengthened through enhancing the ability building of third-party evaluation agencies and it can be realized by improving self-management ability,professional evaluation ability,cultural management ability,policy capturing ability and business development ability;academy-based guarantee can strengthen the scientificity of third-party evaluation,which can be realized by enhancing meta-evaluation of third-party evaluation and reliability research on evaluation.