After entering the 21st century, a series of standards have been developed to build a standards-based quality assurance system for teacher education in China. The building of quality assurance system for teacher education has made some achievements, but it also faces some problem. At present, the building of high-quality teacher education system has been determined as the most important task in the reform and development of teacher education in China. This requires us to improve the quality assurance system for high-quality teacher education on the basis of reflecting on the existing system building. Based on documentary analysis the paper examines the building process and compositions of the standards-based quality assurance system for teacher education in China, and analyzes the problems and challenges of the existing system and puts forward some suggestions on building a quality assurance system for teacher education based on development-oriented teacher professional standards.
Keyword(s) : quality
Digital Educational Content for a Modern Lesson: Quality Assessment Technology
Widely and universally used e-learning systems (ELS) remain the subject of close attention of researchers. An integral and most important part of the ELS is digital educational content. This is a key element for both distance and full-time education, and in recent years it has been widely used not only in higher education, but also in general education. Assessing the quality of educational content for the expert community is a delicate issue, the complexity of which is due to the examinator subjectivity. Modern automation tools, developed within the framework of the artificial intelligence paradigm, which have already demonstrated the ability to solve various problems, allow us to approach this issue from a new position.
The purpose of the article is to present the results of a preliminary study of approaches to increasing the accuracy and objectivity of the examination of the quality of digital educational content through partial automation of expert procedures.
The leading research methods are analysis, examination, modeling, ascertaining experiment, description.
As a result, a theoretical justification for automating the examination of the quality of digital educational content as a new interdisciplinary scientific research area is presented, tasks are set, goals and methods are defined, and the first results obtained within this area are presented. It is shown that the development goal will be the formation of an expanded description of the process of examination of the quality of digital educational content, including proposals for expert procedures implemented only by automation means, description of the examination information model and interpretation of the results of automatic examination.
The novelty of the results obtained lies in the formation of the theoretical foundations for automatic analysis of the digital educational content quality. This will form a fundamentally new quality of assessment procedures in relation to electronic means of teaching and education, based on objective and measurable qualitative characteristics and indicators, formalized stages (processes) of examination, and quantitatively qualified assessment results.
The Documentation for the School System Evaluation and the Teachers Professional Development: A University-school Collaborative Research in Italy
The continuous professional development of the teacher (CPD) has long been considered a
prerequisite for the career and also for economic progress. CPD must be compared to standards
which also make it possible to construct validation systems for the teachers’ skills in progress.
The issue of teaching professionalism emerges also in the Italian legislative debate. We outline the
research “The continuous professional development of the teacher: from the Improvement Plan to the
appraisal”, conducted with a group of 33 schools in Southern Italy, the University of Bari and Unione
Cattolica Italiana Insegnanti Medi (UCIIM, teachers’ association). The research project investigated
the documentation of practices (connected with school’s self-evaluation, teacher evaluation and
appraisal procedures) to improve the quality of teaching and to develop teacher professionalism.
Three phases of research training occurred: a) The first phase involved a specific document analysis
of “Rav” and “PdM” (acronyms for Self-Assessment Report – Rapporto di Auto-Valutazione – and
Improvement Plan – Piano di Miglioramento). These documents were presented to the teaching
staff and served as the primary materials for self-evaluation and decision-making. b) In the second
phase, referred to as “professional development,” the skills audit and standards were introduced and
collaboratively developed with the teachers. These documents formed the foundation of a teacher’s
professional development program. c) The third phase was dedicated to “merit appraisal.” It focused
on selecting and analyzing the best appraisal sheets, which were considered the primary documents
for assessing merit and promoting teachers. The school staff involved over 300 people, including
teachers and principals. The results of the study underlined: the impact of the documentary practices
introduced by school evaluation system on professional development; the importance of university-school collaboration supporting school-based assessment and teachers’ professional development,
shifting from a top-down orientation to more teacher self-regulating initiatives; the methodological-educational choice of principals as teachers’ tutors.
Systematic Reviews on In-Service Training Effectiveness. A Prior Comparative Analysis of the Used Terms
The professional development of teachers has a definite impact on the improvement of the entire
educationalsystem (OECD, 2018; Darling-Hammond, 2017). Forthisreason, the main international
organizations – OECD (2013 ), European Commission (2012 ) – ask countries to establish
feedback and accountability procedures for in-service training (ITT), for the ‘
process by
which teachers engage in further education or training to refresh or upgrade their professional
knowledge, skills and practices in the course of their employment’ (UNESCO, 2019). Researchers
state that here are numerous factors to be considered in carrying out this work: the type and quality
of training, school climate, students’ skills, knowledge domain, etc. (Lipowsky & Rzejak, 2015).
After a brief presentation of howthe mostrecentsystematic reviews on the topic have been conducted
(Filges et al, 2019; Egert et al, 2018; Kalinowski et al., 2019), this article presents the results of a study
on the terms and constructs in use in the context of the researches into in-service teacher/continuing
professional training, impact/effect, and programs/instructions. The data and information collected
offer a comparative analysis (Esser & Hanitzsch, 2012), based on systematic reviews (Polanin et al.,
2019) and a meta-analysis, useful for setting up further meta-analytical investigations on the topic
especially in terms of the disambiguation of terms and the narrowing of the field.
The training of in-service teachers in many countries has been made compulsory and structural
and is conceived as an opportunity for growth and professional development for the entire school
community, and a strategic and functional logic forimproving the quality of the schoolsystem (Perla,
2019).
However, ministries of education do not yet have a univocal model and shared procedures
capable of describing and analysing the impact that the training provided has in the terms set out
in the European Commission (2020): output – results achieved immediately, i.e. increase in skillsfocus subject to training; outcome – wider benefits for involved teachers – improvement of teaching
practices of teachers involved in training; outreach – effects on the institutional and social context of
the school where and of the territory within which the teachers involved in the training.
Cultivating ‘good’ practice or ‘best’ practice? Moralities for teacher education
This paper engages with the double meaning of ‘good’ in English. ‘Good’ can refer to the morally
correct choice, and it can also refer to high quality. The question then becomes whether these types
of ‘good-ness’ refer to the same thing in teacher education. Theoretical treatments of moral goodness
in education highlight morality as a social fact that changes with the times. In contrast, goodness
as quality is tested and measured through international comparisons which increasingly define
what counts as ‘quality’. In available research accounts of Russian education and Scottish education,
different kinds of ‘good-ness’ emerge, with the risk that they conflict. The conclusion reflects on how
we might and should prepare teachers for different versions of goodness and their contradictions.
Evaluation criteria for educational work in a modern Russian university
The urgency of the problem under investigation is due to the fact that in the system of educational work in the modern higher vocational education the objective tendencies in the youth students are insufficiently taken into account. Educational work today acquires special importance as an integral part of specialist training in a modern university. Educating young people is one of the priorities in the field of national security, the most important factor of political, economic and cultural transformation of Russian society. The main purpose of education is to produce creative thinking and harmonious development of profession-als with deep scientific and theoretical knowledge, formed by professional competence, high moral character. The paper pre-sents the analytical evaluation of the quality and criteria for educational work in the universities of Russia, the peculiarities of the educational work in higher educational institutions. In accordance with the problems and the nature of the studies systematic structural and comparative analysis methods are used. The described in the article experience can be used in the process of improving the system of educational work of undergraduate students.