On Student Evaluation Of Teaching Effectiveness In Universities-A Stakeholder Perspective

Student evaluation of teaching effectiveness is an important policy for the teaching quality assurance system in HEIs. The 30 year-old student evaluation of teaching effectiveness in university has become an integral part of the teaching quality assurance system in our country, which is carried out, over the courses and accepted by teachers widely. Since we step into the era of internet, those schools using the online evaluation system are including all of the students as group and the courses of every semester as assessment object. However, the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system has not been recognized and even criticized by the faculty and students. As a kind of analysis framework, the Stakeholders theory has provided us a new paradigm to explain and reveal the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system, in the same time, to solve the problem of it.The Stakeholders of student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system refers to those groups or individuals influence and are influenced by student evaluation of teaching effectiveness in university, which is highly correlated with the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness and makes the human capital investment in this system. And the Stakeholders are including the facuty, students and the teaching administrators. According to the empirical study, the deteministic stakeholders are including the sophomore and junior, the potential are the fresh, senior, assistant, renewable lecturer, associate professor, and professor. The borderline stakeholders are the assessment administrators, the directors of academic affairs office, the college president or teaching secretary in charge of teaching. This result is contrary to the teaching administrator-oriented model, but just coupled the "should state" of the stakeholders pattern in the student evaluation system. The essence of student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in university is the participation of Stakeholders in the teaching quality and the limited intervention of them in management. Consequently, this system will help to protect the academic freedom and to eliminiate the concerns from the faculty and students so as to promote the common governace in teaching quality. From the view of the history of the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in university, the evolution pattern of the Stakeholders in the system has refelcted the game evolution of the Stakeholders' interests and the evolution of the contradiction among the quality, the interest and the power. In the western countries, the pattern of the Stakeholders in the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in university has experienced four stages:the unilateral control model (student-oriented model of the "student type" university in the middle ages), the double main model (both teachers and students from 1900s to 1960s), the student and the teaching administrator-oriented model (from 1960s to 1970s), and the control-cooperation model (between the teaching administrator and the stakeholder since 1970s and to 21st century). Compared with the evolution of the pattern in the western counrties, the pattern of the Stakeholders in our student evaluation of teaching effectiveness in Universities system has experienced only one stage, that is the teaching administrator unilateral control model since 1990s and the age of the online teachiong evaluation we are stepping into. The mainly reason is the beginning mechanism of our system. The western pattern is originated from its democratic practice and promoted by its college students' movement, democratization of high education and the social accountability; On contray to this, our student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in Universities is established to meet the demands of our development of the national evaluation system and to deal with the government administrative checks. At the same time, we have not experienced the primitive accmulation process of the evolution of the western pattern and just introduced the western system in the form of student evaluation with a simple copy.In the existing framework of our student evaluation system, the power-led teaching administrator has risen to the emic status, however, the power-marginalized faculty and students has fallen to the etic status. The deteministic and potential stakeholders in the system lose their power in the aspect of the student evaluation information getting and interests expressing, and they are in the state of having no right to speak with less-values and less-consciousness; therefore the interests of Stakeholders can not be expressed and aggregated. The facuty has been excluded from the decision-making power in the system for a long term; in addition, the students'evaluating power and the administrators' control power improve internal restraint to the facuty formally or potentially; even though the students participate the teaching evaluation in form, they act as rating persons. In the design of the teaching evaluation scale system, the evaluation projects would be designed mostly in the perspective of teaching attitudes, teaching content, teaching methods and teaching effectiveness. Without concerning the students, the power and interest can not be truly realized, but only in form. The immature of our student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in Universities are not only in the power lacking and interset imbalancing, but also reflected that the organization and the system supplies can not play the role of power balancing and cooperation. It tends to control the absence of power and imbalance of interset through collective discussion, so as to buffer the conflicts between the intervention from the teaching administrator and the efficiency-led value.From the view of the future development of the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in university, the pattern of the Stakeholders in this system will change from the authority control to the participatory governance. The Stakeholders participatory governance model will reflect the governance property of the system itself, and also express the teaching character of the system. The participatory governance from the Stakeholders can help to reflect the structural balance of power among the Stakeholders in the design of system, and establish the mechanism of decision-making and power-balancing to the Stakeholders, in order to improve the teaching quality. Consequently, in oder to promote the student evaluation of teaching effectiveness system in Universities in our country, we should improve the teaching evaluation operation based on the experience from the western, and develop internal mechanism of the Stakeholders participatory governance in depth.