An Evaluative Study On The Sustainability In-service Master Of Education

With the development of teacher specialization and lifelong education, teachers of basic education in China needs higher requirements. In1997, Master of Education (ME.d) was formally launched in China, aiming at training highly qualified teachers of the basic education. After a dozen years of development, till2007, Master of Education has been training more than30,000more in-service education masters which improved literacy level, teaching level, education ability, research ability and so on. Therefore it has been playing an active role in promoting teachers’professional development and improving the teaching skills for the basic education. And it has become an important part of teachers’professional training mode in China. However, it has only a dozen years of history, some problems may appear inevitably in the process of its development, which has adverse effects on the sustainability of Master of Education.This research was intended to examine the long-term sustainability of MEd programmes through an investigation of an MEd programme based in Central China. This article follows the question, problem analysis and problem-solving ideas, mainly adopting a questionnaire survey and interview to seek the sustainability of in-service Master of Education.The concepts of ME.d and its history as well as its research status are firstly presented. Next questionnaires and interviews are undertaken to find out the significance of ME.d as well as its problems such as the differences of ability, the impurity of motivation, the lack of support system, the dilemma between study and work, and so on. Then, based on the questionnaires and interview results, the author put forward some solutions from different aspects:strengthening management, adjusting course setting, changing teaching methods, improving the level of teaching, focusing on informationization teaching tools, strengthening the Dissertation supervisionpaper guide, changing roles rapidly, establishing the concept of lifelong education, clearing training objectives, improving the admission threshold, sounding support system, improving the evaluation system. The implications of the study were drawn based on the research findings.