Reform of Chinese Universities in the Context of Sustainable Development: Teacher Evaluation and Improvement Based on Hybrid Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Model

Abstract

China is pushing universities to implement reforms in order to achieve the sustainable development goals, but with the development level of teachers becoming the key restricting factor. In this sense, teacher evaluation and improvement act as positive factors for China to achieve the 2030 sustainable development goals. Previous studies on teacher evaluation have usually assumed that the relationship between the evaluation criteria is independent, with the weights of each standard derived from this assumption. However, this assumption is often not in line with the actual situation. Decisions based on these studies are likely to waste resources and may negatively impact the efficiency and effectiveness of teachers’ sustainable development. This study developed an integrated model for the evaluation and improvement of teachers based on the official teacher evaluation criteria of China’s International Scholarly Exchange Curriculum (ISEC) programme and a multiple criteria decision-making methodology. First, a decision-making trial and a laboratory-based analytical network process were used to establish an influential network-relation diagram (INRD) and influential weights under ISEC standards. Next, an important performance analysis was used to integrate the weight and performance of each standard to produce a worst-performance criterion set for each university teacher. Finally, the worst performance set used an INRD to derive an improvement strategy with a cause–effect relationship for each teacher. This study chose a Chinese university that has implemented teaching reform for our case study. The results show that our developed model can assist decision-makers to improve their current evaluations of teachers and to provide a cause–effect improvement strategy for education reform committees and higher education institutions.

A Novel Improvement Strategy of Competency for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) of University Teachers Based on Data Mining

“…According to the aforementioned task force, developing countries and regions should increase resource investment in teacher training, create innovative training methods, and improve training efficiency. According to the direction and target of sustainable development proposed by the United Nations, the Chinese government implemented the ISEC program, which involves systematically training and developing university teachers [47]. This study focused on the items of the ISEC program for case analysis because of the following reasons: (1) the ISEC program is primarily implemented at Chinses regional universities, which comprise the highest number of teachers in China's higher education, thus, high research representativeness can be achieved; (2) the teachers who were investigated in the ISEC program are from many universities in different provinces, which further strengthens the data representativeness of this study with regard to the competency for ESD in regional university teachers in China; (3) ISEC is an early systematic program in China to explore the ESD competency of university teachers.…”

“…The ISEC program has built its own teachers' competency model. Based on this model, over the past eight years, the ISEC program [47] has provided systematic training to approximately 1,500 teachers in more than 30 regional universities in China. In particular, the training of teaching competencies is emphasized, and the central government proposed China's Education Modernization 2035 in February 2019.…”

Creating an Academic Program Focusing on Energy Management and Sustainability

“…It requires e.g. developing the field of management, research and development, teacher evaluation and also changing academic programs (Tejedor et all, 2019;Weng, Liu and Chuang, 2019). The power generation industry is deeply concerned with the lack of a qualified workforce in the future.…”

Methodology to Analyze the Effectiveness of ESD in a Higher Degree in Education: A Case Study

“…In essence, the use of multiple methods, combined and integrated into a methodology to evaluate teaching and learning, will enable the main causes for why ESD is failing to achieve its objectives to be indentified, as well as where it is possible to bring about improvement by providing specific lines of action to enhance the investment of resources in Spanish universities [24].…”