Research On Dialogic Evaluation Of University Undergraduate Teaching

It is one of the main tasks of Chinese higher education during the 11th Five-Year Plan to improve the quality of university undergraduate teaching, and the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching is one of the important measures to guarantee the quality of higher education teaching. For over ten years from the inception of the evaluation, all universities, colleges and institutions have found the propelling function of the evaluation of teaching and enhanced the quality of higher education by following the principals:"evaluation to promote constructions, evaluation to promote reforms, evaluation to promote management, combining evaluation with constructions and focusing on constructions".The first round of evaluation of higher education teaching, five years a round designed and organized by the Ministry of Education will be completed till the September, 2008. In the past five years, the Higher Education Evaluation Centre in the Ministry of Education has developed with universities simultaneously, and shared many experiences, strategies and joys with them. The first round of the evaluation of undergraduate teaching witnessed tremendous achievements as follows: the significant improvement of teaching facilities, the constant enlargement of faculties, the continued optimization of teaching resources, and the steady enhancement of the teaching quality. However, we can not deny that there are some urgent problems to be concerned and solved in this round of evaluation, such as: government evaluation is the main body, while social evaluation and self-evaluation of universities are only foils; there are problems of"administration, unification, instructions"in the evaluation process and etc.; the self-evaluation of universities has not received the deserved attention, and the subject position of universities, as the objects of evaluation, has not been respected accordingly, thus the universities just manipulated passively in the evaluation of teaching rather than actively participated in it. All of these problems must be drawn great attention and overcome in the second round of the evaluation.Dialogue, a unified thinking way which focuses on the relation of"I–you"advocating equality in handling all issues, has received more and more attentions and love in the world. Dialogue has permeated through every corner of our society: philosophy, politics, economy, science, culture and education etc. and become the spirit mainstream of our era. This research both starts and ends with introducing dialogic spirit and a thinking way of dialogue into the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching, with the dialogue theory and the fourth theory of education evaluation as its theoretical foundation, the five-year a round evaluation of university undergraduates teaching as its object. The research is divided into the following four parts.Introduction lists the facts that the further-step popularization of higher education has attracted people's attention to the quality of higher education, reflected in the series of provisions on the development of national higher education, and the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching is an important component of the system guaranteeing the quality of higher education. However, because the time of evaluation is relatively short, the theoretical research and practical experience have failed to keep pace with the development of evaluation in practice. Moreover, the introduction focuses on the cause of selecting this topic, the status of relevant research at home and abroad and the research method as well.The first chapter discusses the philosophy thinking of the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching in China. With previous researches on this topic, we expound the definition, aim, content and function of the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching in China, and then analyze the subject of evaluation and the subject of value in the process of evaluation on the above basis, furthermore, exploring the fundamental position which the self-evaluation of universities is to occupy in the evaluation and the dialectical relations between the government-based external evaluation and the university-based internal evaluation.The second chapter mainly deals with the status and problems in the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching. On the basis of analysis on the status and problems, the existing system of administrative evaluation has been examined and commented profoundly.The third chapter focuses on the dialogic evaluation of university undergraduate teaching and its strategies. First, the historical background and the new situation that Chinese higher education is going of be confronted after further development are analyzed in details, and on this basis, the conclusion is drawn that the dialogic evaluation of university undergraduate teaching is an inevitable choice for Chinese evaluation of university undergraduate teaching. Then, we discuss the ideological background and theoretical basis of the dialogic evaluation; furthermore, the definition, connotation and basic features of the dialogic evaluation are explored. Finally, we put forward our own ideas to accomplish the strategy of dialogic evaluation.This research fills the gap of the existing studies in this field, enriching the evaluation theories of higher education teaching, so as to promote constructing the theories of evaluation with Chinese characteristics. It is not only to promote the formation of the correct evaluation value, but also help the subjects of evaluation examine and comment on the practice of Chinese evaluation and rectify the unreasonable and unscientific concepts and manipulation in current practices of evaluation, so as to enhance the effectiveness of the evaluation of university undergraduate teaching.