Editorial

Citation

Dalrymple, J. (2006), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 14 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2006.12014caa.001

Editorial

If we adopt the interpretation of quality in education as “perfection” (Harvey and Green, 1993), then we could amplify it with the old adage that says “Simple things make perfection, but perfection is no simple thing”. In this issue we encounter an analysis of a number of approaches that could be regarded as mundane, but, considered as a part of the education system, fundamentally determine its overall performance. Be it controlling truancy, good teaching, peer review, student satisfaction, customer response or understanding quality, as covered by the articles in the current issue, they are all governed by a set of common sense responses which go to make up the characteristics of a quality education system. In addition the book reviews address two more topics which could be considered equally mundane: cost control and productivity. The fact that the highly intellectual education sector has had great problems with tackling such issues effectively is an enigma which many people in the community find it hard to fathom.

The article by Ken Reid proposes the development and implementation of some long-term strategic approaches to tackling truancy and other forms of non-attendance from school. This article focuses upon the innovative School-Based Scheme (SBS) which proposes methods which are relatively easy to organise, implement, monitor and evaluate. It can be used in both primary and secondary schools and/or throughout all schools within a local education authority.

The study by Roediger Voss and Thorsten Gruber aims to develop a deeper understanding of the teaching qualities of effective lecturers that students desire and to uncover the constructs that underlie these desire expectations and reveal the underlying benefits that students look for. A semi-standardized qualitative technique called laddering was applied that allows researchers to reach deeper levels of reality and to reveal the reasons behind the reasons.

The paper by Peter Washer reviews the literature on observation of teaching in a Higher Education context with a view to proposing some guidelines for the design and practice of institutional systems to observe teaching. A literature review and a proposed model for a system of observation of teaching with practical suggestions for managing the process and the information that results from implementation are provided.

The paper by Jacqueline Douglas, Alex Douglas and Barry Barnes utilises the concept of the service-product bundle to design the survey questionnaire and then use SPSS and Quadrant Analysis to analyse the results to determine which aspects of the University’s services were most important and the degree to which they satisfied the students. The purpose of this paper is to report on the design and use of a questionnaire to measure student satisfaction at Liverpool John Moores University’s Faculty of Business and Law.

The purpose of the paper by Catherine Y.P. Chan, S.F. Chan, K. Chan and W.C. Ip is to develop a thinking model to recommend to the vocational education institutions for planning their educational business in the face of marketization. The systems approach is adopted for developing the model. It is not only that they are used for the conceptualization of the principles of systems, but also applied as the technique for reviewing and proposing, where and in what direction, the institutions should improve their business plan to meet transformational change.

Fred A. Koslowski III provides a general review, for academic faculty and administrators, of the dominant themes and history of quality, and assessment in both industry and Higher Education, and how they relate to each other in order to stimulate and encourage debate as well as influence policy. A range of published works (1976-2005) in both the fields of industrial quality and quality and assessment in higher education are reviewed and arranged contextually so as to tell a collective “story” about their origins, similarities, and differences. This general review provides the reader with a structured historical examination of these concepts with practical emphasis on potential lessons learned.

Kerri-Lee Krause follows with a review of the book Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education by William F. Massy. She concludes that in a world where the tension between cost and value is ever-present, administrators and policy researchers, in particular, will find in the book some challenging insights along with practical approaches to assist them in protecting academic values and ethical approaches to the scholarly endeavour, while operating within the realities of the market environment.

Karel Reus reviews the book On Becoming a Productive University: Strategies for Reducing Costs and Increasing Quality in Higher Education, edited by James Groccia, and Judith Miller. He sees the collection as radical in the best sense of that term. The ideas are not really new, but he finds that it is good to see that they are amenable to research and codification in this context. He concludes that even if the papers do not show the way to a definitive re-structuring of the academic ideal and lifestyle, they do demonstrate that there are tried and effective ways of changing at least some practices for the better!

Finally, the team hopes that the articles included for your consideration in this issue will provide inspiration for reflection, individually and collectively, to review some of the perspectives on and practices for quality in education.

John DalrympleFor the Editorial Team