EDUCATION QUALITY ASSESSMENT: NOT QUALIMETRY, BUT PHILOSOPHY OF MUTUAL RECOGNITION
Svetlana Svizhevskaya
National Mining University
Dnepropetrovsk
Ukraine
The Head of Licensing and Accreditation Office
Abstract: This paper considers formation of such concept as “higher education quality” in the context of mutual coexistence management, pedagogical and personal approaches to its assessment. Analysis of international practice and achievements of the scientific community in Ukraine gives a set of tools for philosophical understanding of the culture of quality, developing of a flexible system of quality management in higher education based on the recognition of the national strategy, using of proven results of educational research, improving of the skills of all the educational process participants, implementing of personal interests.
Key-words: education quality assessment, qualimetry, TQM theory, pedagogical values, quality culture.
Modern pedagogy aspires to understanding holistic educational process from the viewpoint of management activities aimed at developing solutions, organization, control, management of the control object in accordance with the specified target, analysis and summarizing based on reliable information.
At the same time it is impossible to put into the framework of purely administrative category such living, cognitive functioning system as pedagogy.
Like any other moral values pedagogical ones cannot be implemented spontaneously. They depend on social, political, and economic relations in society, which in many ways effect the progress of pedagogy and educational practice. This relationship is not mechanical; the matter is that desired and required by the community often conflict that is possible to be solved by a particular person, a teacher, using his/her worldview, ideals, choosing methods of culture reproduction and development.
Education quality, i.e. the quality of teaching and learning at higher educational institutions, reflects the extent to which learning activities and teaching aids help students to reach the adequate learning goals specified by the curriculum.
Guarantee of education quality encompasses both the structure and the processes by which institutions maintain the quality using various systematic actions to provide education quality planned in advance. This is so-called general term covering several tools used for monitoring the education quality and its improvement. Among the tools are: monitoring, accreditation, periodic measurements of the starting points as well as various qualimetric quality management tools.
Qualimetry is a field of science covering methodological and practical issues of quality assessment (from the Latin root “qualitas” - quality, property, nature and “quails” – what kind of and the Greek word “metreo” - measure).
The two terms are applied in qualimetry – measurement and assessment. The name of “qualimetry” shows that its apparatus includes all kinds of assessments of any range obtained by different methods.
Differential estimates are not only an instrument of quality control, but without them it is impossible to obtain a comprehensive assessment. In fact, the individual indicators assessment used as a background for comprehensive assessment is nothing more than differential assessments.
Thus, the problem of quality control is elaboration and development of quality assessment methods (both complex and differential).
Over the past few years world scientific community have done a great job in the sphere of education quality assessment: the subject of quality science has been formulated; many countries have developed state standards for education quality monitoring; several terminological standards have been worked out; guidelines for determining the quality level have been elaborated; a number of papers on specific types of education quality assessment have been published etc.
Experience of the USA and Europe shows that education quality management involves participation of government agencies, educational institutions, civil society organizations and trade unions making it possible to assess the quality of the educational activities, their potential, compliance of education content with labour market requirements as well as with individual‘s desire to be realized in society.
To tell the truth, in our country quality education questions being topical stay practically unsolved within the last decade.
Despite the efforts of scientists, the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, the Ministry of Education and Science, universities, great amount of teachers; it is impossible today guaranteeing graduates minimum knowledge and skills, and their application being the part of State Standard.
It can be justified by insufficient financing, permanent changes in education content, not always successful innovations in the education system. However, scientific and technical progress, global transformation in the world give society so rapid dynamics that these factors cannot be the only reason for low education quality and unreadiness of young people for life and professional activities.
Further progress of our state depends on education quality requiring clear and reasonable answers for the question: what is the quality of education, how to assess it, what mechanisms and tools are to be applied for training quality to meet needs of people, the state, society and employers. However, the notion of education quality stays debatable; scientists identify this notion with the quality of education and institution, level of education, quality of educational process meeting the requirements of social and professional environment. All these issues require urgent but scientifically grounded pedagogical solutions.
We believe that the solution should involve three horizontals: administrative, pedagogical, and personal. All of them are absolutely equal; moreover, they should take into account each other which make them a key to success.
As for quality management, perfect example is the theory of Deming - TQM (Total Quality Management, 1946-1950) using not only qualimetric quality analysis but also developing the quality policy; it can be also called a philosophy of life quality.
Basing on scientific sources, one can note that quality management involves several steps:
- Analysis of needs and expectations of customers and stakeholders;
- Development of mission and goals in the field of quality assurance;
- Identification of processes and responsibilities for quality assurance;
- Identification of priorities and resources to ensure quality;
- Identification of quality assessment methods at each implementation stage;
- Application of assessment and quality control methods;
- Development of a system for control, quality and improvement management.
Nowadays aspiration for optimizing education management, using market mechanisms as a factor of self-education, establishing a balance between different financial sources becomes critical in the process of education modernization.
It should be recognized that the quantitative methods of quality assessment depend heavily on human factors.
What is the quality of education at the university? First, it is the quality of the results - knowledge, skills, and competencies of students, their level of culture and morality, civic position. Second, high quality of educational process depends on the content of disciplines ensured by all training resources: methodological, material and technical, financial, and staffing.
Third, qualitative performance of the entire system of higher school, management at all levels of governance: at the level of authorities, faculties, departments, and certain service offices.
Changes in social and living standards, society needs and personal development involve transformations in pedagogical values. Strengthening of democratic tendencies results in the development of non-traditional forms and methods of training. Subjective perception of pedagogical values is determined by highly moral teacher's personality, his/her professional orientation reflecting his/her personal growth.
Social importance of pedagogical activity and its humanistic essence includes:
• Values associated with the establishment of personality’s role in social and professional environment (social significance of pedagogical activity, status value of teaching, recognition of the profession by the closest personal environment etc.);
• Values meeting communication needs and extending the circle (communication with children, colleagues, surrounding people, love and affection of children, sharing spiritual values etc.);
• Values orienting to self-development of creative individuality (possibilities to develop professionalism and creativity, inclusion in the world culture, devotion to things you like, self-improvement etc.);
• Values which help to be self-realized (creative and alternative nature of a teacher’s activity, romance and attractiveness of the profession, the ability to help children at risk etc.);
• Values giving the ability to meet pragmatic needs (chance to get guaranteed public service post, remuneration and paid leave, career promotion etc.).
While searching for the ways to implement objectives of professional activities, pedagogue selects his/her strategy which content is both self- development and development of students. Hence, values-objectives reflect state educational policy and the level of pedagogical science development; subjectifying they become significant factors in education quality assessment.
Humanistic parameters of pedagogical activity being his/her “eternal” benchmarks allow fixing the level of differences between real and required things, reality and ideal; they stimulate for creative overcoming of these gaps, causing aspiration for self-improvement and determine sense of life and personal identity of a teacher. His/her system of values can be generalized in motivational and axiological attitude to pedagogical activity being an indicator of humanistic orientation of an individual.
Such attitude is characterized by the unity of objective and subjective, where objective position of a teacher is the basis for his/her selective focus on the pedagogical values stimulating general and professional self-development and being a factor of his/her professional and social activity.
Ensuring quality and the means may be understood in different ways. However, it is absolutely clear that the sequence of actions is as follows: availability of certain quality level, aspiration to improve it, own concept development, implementing measures for quality assurance and quality control are meant.
Then the sequence repeats taking into account accumulated experience that allows achieving further quality improvement. Accordingly, quality assurance is the problem of comprehension and aspiration that we can define as a quality culture in pedagogical and personal sense of the word “culture” as well as a question of methodology. In this context, methodology is organizations, procedures, and mechanisms which may be called means of quality control. Altogether, these three elements form quality culture in a general sense.
