ارزیابی تطبیقی-کارآمدی آموزش دانشگاهی: رویکردی مناسب برای چالشهای روش‌شناسی بهبود کیفیت

Educational evaluation aims at understanding and examining educational performance to govern the educational activities for the improvement of productivity and quality. Due to the complex structure of educational activities accompanied with the diversity of higher education beneficiaries’ expectations, however, the methodology of educational evaluation has been the main concern of educational researchers and stimulated intellectual controversies and challenges. This article critically evaluates the capabilities of the conventional and comparative-efficient educational evaluation approaches and claims that in a complex context like education which is also dominated by a resource scarcity and growing competition environment, it is the comparative-efficient approach that can provide the appropriate evaluation of educational groups. In that regard we analyze data on the characteristics of 10 educational groups After incorporating the comparativeness and efficiency aspects of educational evaluation, we achieve completely different but promising results and findings. In addition, we are able to determine the factors dominating educational performance and to prescribe the most economical ways and policies to improve education quality. For the educational groups, we found that books and instructional materials, teaching on-the-job training and class size reduction are respectively the most important and cost-effective factors for the improvement of education quality. That is, spending one money-unit on such factors increases education quality by 0.215, 0.1 and 0.01 points, respectively. Such findings that are very crucial in policy making for the improvement of higher education quality, are merely achievable through conducting the comparative-efficient evaluation of educational performance.