Exploration On The Impact Analysis Of Educational Policies

It has been a challenging but unavoidable research problem encountered by the Chinese academia that what impacts an educational policy or a cluster of policies has on the educational development in different areas and levels. With a case study of the compulsory and higher educaton policies in Tibet (1991-2008), this thesis discusses how to conduct an impact anlayis of educational policies under a non-experimental condition from both the technical and the paradigmatic perspectives.By adopting the Policy Process Model of Dunn (1994), the thesis elaborates the presumptions and its limitations in an impact analysis of educational policies from the aspects from Policy Input, Policy Output and Policy Impact. First of all, it defines a text pool of the compulsory and higher education policies in Tibet (1991-2008) and analyzes the characteristics of the discourses, the measures and the goals by using Content Analysis. Then it quantitates part of the Policy Output in accord with the distribution of the policy resources and explores the correlative relationships between the quantitative indicators of Policy Output and those of Policy Impact.The case study fails to draw any specific conclusions concerning the impact of the compulsory and higher education policies in Tibet because of two reasons. First, the limited size of sample with the same statistical caliber available from authorative yearbooks is not sufficiently reliable to support a Multiple Linear Regression Model. Secondly, conclusions drawn by Simple Linear Regression Model are not valid since the sample violates the classical Gauss Preassumption. Based on the problems of the case study, the thesis turns to discuss the related techniques and paradigms of impact analysis of educational policies, which aims to provide a reference for other researchers.