Op-Ed Contributors

The importance of quality education

By Sally Thomas (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-15 07:41

Overall, the research seeks to promote the development of teacher and school quality as well as innovation in school evaluation and "value added" approaches through guidelines for implementation and bottom-up and top-down dialogues involving key stakeholders such as local and national policymakers, teachers and students. Such research is relevant because the quality of primary and secondary education is a crucial input contributing to the quality of higher education outcomes, especially in providing students with the necessary grounding in core knowledge and skills (and assessing these appropriately), in order to bring students up to the minimum level required for university education.

In these circumstances, building research capacity in China to enhance primary and secondary school quality, through, for example, teacher training and support for school self evaluation, is another important strategy to address educational quality issues. The key message is that higher education capacity development can play a crucial role in supporting and improving the quality of basic education, which then subsequently feeds back into enhancing the quality of higher education.

As the World Bank and UNESCO said 10 years ago: "The quality of knowledge generated within higher education institutions, and its availability to the wider economy, is becoming increasingly critical to national competitiveness." They also rightly emphasized that "A strong research system at the national level opens up the possibility that substantial additional public benefits can be realized through international links."

This is precisely why Chinese students and academics should contribute to these global benefits, reforming and improving evaluation systems for educational and academic quality. Original and good research, especially in science, economics and social sciences, has a trickle-down effect on society. And it offers additional benefits even without international links, though international collaboration and exchange of the best evaluation policy and practice can bring substantial advantages to all partners in relation to lessons learned elsewhere.

The author is a professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, UK.

(China Daily 07/15/2010 page9)