Quality in Education: Conceptions
© Ross Woods
"Quality" is one of education's vaguest ideas. A great many books and articles on educational quality never define it.
The Speaker-approval View
"Purr words" are a category of words which, largely devoid of conceptual content, do little more than signify the speaker's approval. (Leech, 1974:51f) Being conceptually vacuous, this is the most useless of all meanings of quality.
The Ineffable View
Some educators conceive of quality as too complex and situation-specific for human words to describe.
For all practical purposes, so many things are part of "quality" that no single description can suffice. Quality is like the king's new clothes.
The great weakness of this view is that it prevents much further discussion.
Value for Money
Quality is value for money. This is actually is a kind of non-definition in that it provides no definition of quality itself, that is, of what it is for which one pays.
Organisational structure
Another unhelpful idea is that quality is organizational structure.
Some accreditors have largely assumed that the prominent elements in quality education is good policies for the institution, its finances, time usage, and academic management, and credit structures.
Comparative View
Some writers see quality as a comparison between institutions.
For Seneca and Taussig, quality is what the most prestigious institutions do that others want to emulate. (1987:27)
Similarly, Solmon reports the peculiarly American idea of rating schools in order starting from the "best"; he wisely adds that it is wrong and harmful always to view those not at the top as failures (1981:8, 12).
This idea of quality is also very weak; it completely begs the question of what ranking criteria one uses.
Intensity
Peters and Austin mention that intensity and dedication do more to ensure a high-quality program than what is actually done. An otherwise bad program with lots of vitality, empathy, and intensity can be much better than a program with good methods and no intensity. (1985:465ff) According to this view, quality refers to teachers' attitudes.
This factor affects educational research as the Hawthorne effect. That is, experimental subjects respond differently when they know that they are part of an experiment; they try harder to make the experiment a success. For example, an experimenter might test a very poor teaching method. If the experiment's teachers realize they are part of an experiment using a new method and become enthusiastic, they might actually produce good learning results. Experimenters work hard to neutralize this factor. (Cf. Tuckman, 1978:102f)
Environment or Experience
In this view, quality is that to which students are exposed which evokes learning, and not so much what students are shown to have learned. Quality refers to environment or student's personal experience of learning.
The Value-added View
This view asks how far the student travelled during his study, without enquiring where he was when he started or finished. In other words, how much "value" did education add to the student? The idea is that a remarkably good student would start well ahead of the average student, but both would learn equal amounts. According to this view, quality refers to the school as a catch-up or accelerator program.
Metricism
Metricism is the idea that educational quality can be reduced to statistical information. For example, accreditors can require schools to have a certain ratio of full-time staff to students, so many books in the library, so many doctorates, and so much lecture-room space.
Metricism takes several major forms, all of which obscure rather than illuminate the meaning of quality.
a. Length of time. The longer a program takes, the higher its supposed quality. For example, it is easy and practical to describe study in numbers of hours, and qualifications in numbers of years of full-time study.
Nevertheless, the use of time totals alone is very inadequate. It says nothing about what kind of learning students have, and is as feeble as any other effort to reduce education to numbers.
b. Resources. Quality, supposedly, is a simple list of statistics. The school should have a certain ratio of full-time staff to students, so many books in the library, so many doctorates, and so much lecture-room space. (Ferris, 1986:3f)
c. Standardized Tests and Examination Results. Some writers suggest this as the best quality measure. For example, Bee and Dolton (1985) suggest that in the English system, the proportion of first class and upper second class honors degrees compared with student intake three years earlier, adequately gauges "quality." Lerner (1986) argues that aptitude tests of verbal and mathematical reasoning ability give the most reliable and standardizable results. She mentions the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as a good example (cf. also Hopkins, 1987:4f).
d. Educational indicators. This approach assumes that quality is expressible in the kinds of standardizable statistics preferred by planners and decision-makers.
Almost any statistic, no matter how indirectly related to quality, can become an educational indicator, including time, resources, and test results. The idea of indicators is not new, and its literature is extensive and inconclusive.
It is probably fair to say that many indicators are helpful. Given a poor showing on relevant indicators, most responsible schools would take a careful look at their programs.
Indicators can be valid if they suit all schools equally. Moreover, most statistics have some underlying value; for example, a criterion asking for six thousand usable titles in a library really tries to ensure that students have adequate access to complex information.
No indicator, however, represents quality. Lining up valid objections to indicators is easy, and they show either that indicators fail to indicate quality or that present methodologies are inadequate:
- The theoretical base of indicators is still very weak.
- Lists of statistics are too inflexible.
- Quantitative methods are not yet adequate.
- Some indicators depend on human judgments, assuming that individual biases will average out.
- Indicators are difficult to interpret.
- Indicators are political.
- Teachers might not take much notice of them anyway.
- Indicators assume comparability between schools and similarity between delivery systems.
- A set of indicators only reflects selected aspects, never a whole educational system.
- Indicators are indirect; they hardly ever deal what students actually learn.
The Product View
In this view, the quality of education is the quality of the objectives it reaches. Using means-ends thinking, it inquires into the "product," that is, what the student has done to show that he has learned something as predetermined in a set of objectives.
Its essential values are purposefulness, fitness for purpose, and the articulation and realization of purposes. HEC (1992:6) even goes so far as to call name the product view "fitness for purpose".
Other authors mention seven variations of this view of quality:
a. Ways of reaching goals. In a means-end mentality, this is the means. The idea is that a school should not only show that it achieves its goals, but that it should check the quality of the ways it achieves them.
b. Conformance between goals and actions. (George, 1982:47) If what the school does suits its goals, then the program has quality, on this count at least.
c. Immediate post-instruction product. The behavioral objectives literature often assumes that product refers to what students can do immediately after instruction.
d. Product at the end of the subject. For example it is not too difficult to write a list of specific, useful objectives for an individual subject, like Philosophy 206 or History 101. Means-ends curriculum developers suggest this level of goal, although they sometimes call them "aims" or "general objectives."
e. Graduation product. Some writers refer to the product at the end of the program of study.
f. Culminating product. Some products are concrete pieces of work which represent the highest level of achievement of which the student is capable.
g. School product. Especially in product-based accreditation, an important kind of product is defined in the school's statement of mission.
h. Eventual product. This kind of quality asks what students eventually do after graduation. Johnes and Taylor ask whether university graduates get jobs and how good their jobs are. (1987:582; also Barnett, 1987:281)
h. Generic objectives. In this view, quality is the extent to which a school's goals and activities contribute to achieving the aims of higher education. Many academics write their own lists of goals for theoretical reasons with little practical purpose. Some of the lists of objectives are useful in that they articulate assumptions which would otherwise be left unsaid.
Strengths of the Product View
As an approach to quality, the product view has some major advantages. First, it is flexible. It fits any program no matter how unique or contextualized, as long as it can express its goals as objectives.
Second, it assumes that issues of quality and the goals of education are essentially expressible in language.
Third, it provides a rational means-ends basis for formulating and evaluating programs; it is hard to deny that means should suit their ends.
Fourth, students need to be able to do the job for which they are trained. If they cannot, then the school has failed no matter how high its academic standards are and no matter how much its students learn.
Fifth, it provides a way to respond to students who are already practitioners who might to a larger extent already be producing the "product" before graduating. The hoped-for change is then the discrepancy between the student's present skills and the program objectives.
The Consensus View of Quality
The quality of a program, at least in this view, is whatever a group of people decides it is after discussing it in the light of their shared and competing values.
The group normally has different interest groups which must negotiate with each other. The dynamics of the organization determines what constitutes a consensus, who should reach it, and how they reach it.
The idea of consensus plays an important role in maintaining standards.
Consensus groups need to be large and capable enough to functionally maintain standards. For accreditors, the matter is rather simple; whichever way a school chooses, it must show that it has a capable consensus group.
The Importance of the Consensus View
This view is highly influential, especially as traditional academia depends so heavily on consensus group evaluation. Perhaps its main weakness is that it provides only a sociological basis for ethics and educational ideals; it does not subscribe to ideals higher than group opinion. Like product accreditation, it depends on internal consistency, which brings its own share of problems.
It has several major strengths. It has usually maintained high standards, and assumes that infinitely many factors can affect quality. It can use any other view of quality to which people are willing to agree.
To accept this view is to accept reality. Consensus has decision-making power to determine what will happen regardless of other factors; evaluation is partly a political process and in this sense at least, this view is obligatory. It is important, however, to differentiate between consensus groups as something that will happen anyway and as a positive tool in maintaining standards.
To its credit, it does not impose values from outside the consensus group. Small groups often depend on wider consensus groups; for example, a school can find a guiding consensus in an association of schools, and an association can depend on a national education system or an international network.
Internal to each school. One kind of consensus group is the group of people who plays a part in the accountability structures of a school, including members of the board of governors, teaching staff, administrators, and thesis readers.
Having a qualified faculty is the simplest and usually most practical consensus group for day-to-day internal quality control, and private accreditors normally require it.
Another kind of consensus group, which is also limited to the school, is the academic advisory council that takes active responsibility for standards.
Degrees. Accreditation methods have traditionally assumed that academic degrees represent consensus groups. Degrees, presumably, are a measure of expertise according to the standards of the school that issued the degree.