中文雜誌館的部落格

高教評鑑 6月號/2009 第三卷第1期限量出售

博客來親子育樂-教育分類站長推薦

Higher Education is currently facing a number of challenges and shifts related to the quality assurance of programs and institutions globally. As Burno Curvale stated that "Today, quality assurance is more and more about helping individual decision makers, students and families in a particular, when deciding about the choice of education or the choice of an institution". Based on it, higher education institutions are expected to manage themselves carefully so that students can be offered a good educational experience and graduate with a qualification that’s worth having. Hence, shifts in the new concept of quality assurance or evaluation in higher education are taking place and developments are at different stages across the whole world, including the Asian Pacific region. This issue of Evaluation in Higher Education examines some of above trends and implications both from the American and Asian perspectives. There are 5 great papers regarding quality assurance and ranking of higher education in this issue, including Student learning outcomes in Japanese higher education, Innovation Theory implication in American higher education, Self-improvement in American graduate educational leadership programs, Comparative study in university ranking, and Evaluation in industry-academia-government collaborations in Taiwan Higher Education."

Akiyoshi Yonezawa (Tohoku University) and Rie Mori (NIAD-UE) examine recent policy trends that emphasize learning outcomes and quality assurance in Japanese higher education, and the social background of these governmental initiatives in their paper. They also discuss the implications for East Asian countries and outline how the performance of higher education systems might be optimized by combining initiatives by the state, academics, and the market in a globalized era.

Chun-Mei Zhao (the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) and David Cheng (Columbia University) address if Clayton Christensen’s acclaimed innovation theory in the businesses is applicable to the field of higher education including American top-tier and low-tier institutions. Laarni Goma, Brendan Maxcy, Jay Paredes Scribner (University of Missouri) provide an insightful observation about the accountability of educational leadership programs in American higher education and how they achieve higher quality in their outcomes in their article.

Ruth A. Pagell, librarian of Li Ka Shing Library in Singapore Management University addresses the topic of ranking in the H University Research Rankings: From Page Counting to Academic Accountability". Her paper synthesizes current international and national rankings and the use of bibliometrics to them. She also fmds that the best Asian universities from the past remain the best of
today.

The article by Chia Hui Hou and Jen Chia Chang adopts the concept of theory-based evaluation as framework to further discuss the related program evaluation of industry-academia-govemment collaboration in Taiwan higher education and accordingly constructs a ’’theory -based program evaluation model".

Quality assurance, whether in the perspective of institutions or students, can provide the means with all stakeholders in pursuit of good quality and excellence We believe that all papers in the issue will help inspire local and international readers the new ideas in university evaluation and advance higher education to new heights in the century. Finally, on behalf of Higher Education Evaluation &
Accreditation Council of Taiwan, we would like to publicly thank our referees for their thoughtful comments on all articles in the issue.

Ching-Shan Wu, Editor in-Chief
Bao-Jinn Wang, Executive Editor
Yung-Chi Hou, Subeditor
June 2009