- "What is 'the Quality of Education'? (A UNESCO Perspective)" in Cross-National Studies of the Quality of Education: Planning Their Design and Managing Their Impact
- "Towards and Index of Quality Education"
While I have a long term interest in indicators and have some experience in indicators in the health sector and some experience teaching, indicators of quality in the field of education are way out of my experience.
The talk was in the context of the original Education for All conference:
In the following paragraphs are a few thoughts I had on variations in the way quality might be considered.
The talk was in the context of the original Education for All conference:
The World Conference on Education For All (WCEFA), held in Jomtien, Thailand, in March, 1990, was an initiative intended to stimulate international commitment to a new and broader vision of basic education to "meet the basic learning needs of all, to equip people with the knowledge, skills, values, attitudes they need to live in dignity, to continue learning, to improve their own lives, and to contribute to the development of their communities and nations." (source)I was struck by Dr. Pigozzi's ideas as to learning outcomes, as shown in the following table:
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| Source: Mary Joy Pigozzi |
In the following paragraphs are a few thoughts I had on variations in the way quality might be considered.
Learning Quality verses Service Quality
Dr. Pigozzi put "learning" at the center of her discussion, which got me to wonder about the difference between "the quality of learning" and "the quality of services contributing to learning". Let me give an example to clarify the concept. In a classroom environment one can sometimes see that "learning is really going on". That is the students are fully engaged, they are asking salient questions, going beyond the nominal content of the curriculum, gaining not only knowledge but skills in analysis and enthusiasm for the subject and values appropriate to the scholar and member of society. The quality of the classroom instruction might best be judged in terms of the likelihood that it will produce quality learning and just how high the expected learning might be. One would expect a skilled and talented teacher, with a small class, teaching materials well suited to the students needs and interests, with effective teaching supplies and aids to produce high quality services, but a skilled observer working with a good quality index might be still more accurate in measuring the quality of the service.
However, it seems to me that the learner must be granted some credit for learning well, even with high quality help for his/her learning efforts, as he/she must bear some of the responsibility for low quality learning in almost any circumstances. Thus the rate of learning seems to me to be a function both of how seriously the learner takes on the task of learning and the quality of the help he/she gets in learning.
Learning is perhaps a rate variable -- the rate of accumulation of knowledge, values, skills and behaviors. We usually measure learning however with tests for a cumulative learning -- how much knowledge and/or skill have been accumulated over time, how much values and/or behavior have changed. It is a rare learning environment that can provide services to the learner of continued and uniform high quality over an extended period of time. While we might be interested in the average quality, wouldn't it be nice to have means to provide immediate quality feedback so that any decreases could be rapidly corrected.
Educational Quality versus Learning Quality
However, it seems to me that the learner must be granted some credit for learning well, even with high quality help for his/her learning efforts, as he/she must bear some of the responsibility for low quality learning in almost any circumstances. Thus the rate of learning seems to me to be a function both of how seriously the learner takes on the task of learning and the quality of the help he/she gets in learning.
Learning is perhaps a rate variable -- the rate of accumulation of knowledge, values, skills and behaviors. We usually measure learning however with tests for a cumulative learning -- how much knowledge and/or skill have been accumulated over time, how much values and/or behavior have changed. It is a rare learning environment that can provide services to the learner of continued and uniform high quality over an extended period of time. While we might be interested in the average quality, wouldn't it be nice to have means to provide immediate quality feedback so that any decreases could be rapidly corrected.
Educational Quality versus Learning Quality
Words carry all sorts of connotations. There are people who have learned a lot, are deeply skilled with fine values who contribute greatly to society through their behavior. Indeed who know a lot, but are not considered "highly educated". Indeed, "well educated" and "highly educated" may have different meanings. A very effective engineer or corporate executive might be considered "well educated" in the sense of having achieved mastery of that needed to carry out complex and socially important functions. Perhaps a senior professor in the humanities department of a major university, widely read in great works, literate in several languages, etc. might be seen as "highly educated". The difference is not in how much education one has achieved but in what kind of education. One might therefore differentiate quality of learning and of services to help learners learn in terms of the abilities one is learning versus the wisdom one has gaining.
Learning: Individual, Group or Community
The discussion thus far has been focused on the individual student, the quality of his/her learning and of the services he/she receives to facilitate that learning. It seems to me that we very often learn in groups, such as the small group formed by a nuclear family or the larger group formed by the members of an extended family. It is not obvious to me that an approach which offered the greatest help to the individual learner would be that offering the greatest help to a group. Moreover, I can easily imagine two groups that appeared similar in most ways but in which one learned more effectively with the same help as the other due to a better quality of learning within the group.
I recently posted on community learning centers. Homo sapiens is a social species. It is known that we communally have more knowledge than we do individually, that we make better decisions communally than individually. I tried to make the point that a community learning center is both a center in which members of the community learn, and in which the community as a whole "learns" in the sense that the community as a whole comes better to learn to know, to learn to do, to learn to be, and to learn to live together.
Extending the discussion to quality, we can consider both the quality of the services provided to a community as community in helping it to learn, and the quality of the learning by and in the community.
One of the students in the seminar is working on a project focusing on how communities are being built (rebuilt) in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. There are lots of agencies seeking to offer "community development" services to help people come together in effective communities after the disaster, and surely the services that they are offering must differ from organization to organization; thus one can consider the quality of the community development services offered by each agency. However, it seems obvious to me that the people themselves who are coming together to form a community will bear considerable responsibility for their success; thus one can also consider the quality of the community building efforts of the community itself. (Is community development in this sense simply a form of a service seeking to enhance community learning? Are there other services that seek to enhance community learning that are not "community development services"?)
The discussion thus far has been focused on the individual student, the quality of his/her learning and of the services he/she receives to facilitate that learning. It seems to me that we very often learn in groups, such as the small group formed by a nuclear family or the larger group formed by the members of an extended family. It is not obvious to me that an approach which offered the greatest help to the individual learner would be that offering the greatest help to a group. Moreover, I can easily imagine two groups that appeared similar in most ways but in which one learned more effectively with the same help as the other due to a better quality of learning within the group.
I recently posted on community learning centers. Homo sapiens is a social species. It is known that we communally have more knowledge than we do individually, that we make better decisions communally than individually. I tried to make the point that a community learning center is both a center in which members of the community learn, and in which the community as a whole "learns" in the sense that the community as a whole comes better to learn to know, to learn to do, to learn to be, and to learn to live together.
Extending the discussion to quality, we can consider both the quality of the services provided to a community as community in helping it to learn, and the quality of the learning by and in the community.
One of the students in the seminar is working on a project focusing on how communities are being built (rebuilt) in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. There are lots of agencies seeking to offer "community development" services to help people come together in effective communities after the disaster, and surely the services that they are offering must differ from organization to organization; thus one can consider the quality of the community development services offered by each agency. However, it seems obvious to me that the people themselves who are coming together to form a community will bear considerable responsibility for their success; thus one can also consider the quality of the community building efforts of the community itself. (Is community development in this sense simply a form of a service seeking to enhance community learning? Are there other services that seek to enhance community learning that are not "community development services"?)
The Information Revolution: Learning with an ICT Surround
Learning is no longer simply a human function, but must be considered
- in terms of the complex of the human and the assets he/she brings to the storage and retrieval of knowledge, to the acquisition and utilization of skills, etc.
- in terms of the information and communications infrastructure and institutional infrastructure of the learning community.
Consider for example the aspect of learning as the acquisition of knowledge. In my youth a student was encouraged to learn to use the library as the repository of knowledge; one was not expected to learn by memory all that might be of use or interest in life, but more realistically also to learn how to search within the stored information in books and the library. In the information age one may find knowledge not only in the library but on the World Wide Web. Thus one of the key skills one acquires through learning today is not only how to find information in the library but also computer literacy, how to find and evaluate information on the Internet. So too, human analytic ability is amplified by the quantitative and logical capacities of the computer, and learning today is not only how to figure with pencil and paper but how to model and analyze with computers. Indeed, "learning to do" today may well involve learning to utilize not how to work with hand tools, but how to operate modern computer aided manufacturing equipment or to run an automated facility. That kind of learning may mean changing abilities of the human, but it might also mean changing the abilities of the machines, changing the interface between human and machine, or all three simultaneously.
The community that might learn today is not only that in which people approach face to face, but the communities in which people approach via the telephone and internet, or increasingly via crowd sourcing. The learning done by that community must be recognized to include building linkages with a much wider network of contacts and associates and participating in a much larger set of institutions than was the case only a few decades ago.
As in the previous paragraphs, services can be and are provided to help individuals and communities learn in these information and communication technology (ICT) intensive ways, and those services can be measured in terms of their quality. So too, the effort and skill put forth by individuals (and their ICT surrounds) and communities (and their ICT infrastucture) can be considered in terms of the quality of their learning.
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| Dr. Pigozzi's Model |
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