Factors Influencing School-University Collaboration

From the mid of 80s of the 20th century, school-university collaboration/partnership has attracted many educationists' attention as a strategy to simultaneously improve school education and teacher education. Also from the beginning of 1980s, encouraged by the Education Authority, more and more schools began to engage in educational research to improve the quality of schooling in Mainland China. In order to acquire necessary support from educational researchers, most of these schools chose to collaborate with normal universities or other educational research institutions in their school-based researches. However, compared with the research results of abroad, few researches are conducted based on the context of Mainland China. My research aims is to investigate the influencing factors in the collaboration of school and university through analyzing a case.In this thesis, multiple methods of data collection, including interview, field observing and collecting documents, were adopted in this qualitative study. 4 teachers and 2 principals (including vice principals) and 2 university educators were interviewed, all of the interviews were recorded.All the interview records were transcribed and were read repeatedly along with field notes and documents. Themes, comments and ideas emerging during this period were written down and acted as guidelines for further data-analysis. At last the themes were categorized and sequenced into the final report.This thesis describes the background of this case, analyzes the barriers of collaboration and strategies taken in this case to ensure the effectiveness of the university-school collaboration. This thesis also discusses issues relating to university-school collaboration in China such as (1) different concerns of the participants and how they influence the process and product of the collaboration; (2) differences in professional background, conflicts of time allotment, conflicts between academic interests and practical interests; (3) importance of 'successful experience' to the success of a university-school collaboration; (4) necessity of communication and sharing among collaboration participants, and (5) clearness of roles, rules and responsibility in the process of collaboration.