Students’ Expectation and Perception on Service Quality in a Public Higher Vocational College in China

Abstract

Currently there is a rapid increase of higher vocational college students in China. As such, whether the services provided by colleges meet the needs of students has become the great concern of the management. The main purpose of this study is to examine a difference between students’ expectation and perception on the overall service quality and its five dimensions in a higher vocational college in China. This study is based on Parasuraman’s SERVQUAL model. Descriptive research design and quantitative method was employed in this study. Quantitative data was collected using questionnaires. The sample of the study consisted of 400 second-year students (200 males and 200 females) from Guangdong Polytechnic of Science and Technology in Guangdong Province, China. Prior to the actual study, a pilot test was carried out to obtain the reliability and validity of the instrument. The quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive analysis and paired samples t-test (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, SPSS Version 25.0). From the descriptive analysis, the highest difference between these five dimensions is Empathy, followed by Responsiveness, Assurance, Tangibility and the lowest was Reliability. Results from the paired samples t-test indicated that there were significant differences between students’ expectation and their perception on overall service quality and empathy dimension of service quality. Therefore, findings of this study suggest that the higher vocational colleges should improve their service quality, and empathy dimension of service quality is the criterion that needs addressing urgently by the management to satisfy their students.

Exploring Chinese and Ethiopian higher VET adolescent learning motivation through the lens of self‑determination theory

“…A national report stated that higher VET enrollment had shown a sizable increment from 2010 of 9.62 million to 12.87 million in 2019, a difference of 3.14 million. Particularly, the recent enrollment of higher VET students in 2018 and 2019 has shown an enrollment growth of 1.47 million, with a 12.97% growth rate [10,28,45,47]; nevertheless, the teacher-student ratio is low [11,43]. For decades higher VET colleges have been entitled to the last resort for academically incompetent [13,31,37,39,42,46], low socioeconomic, and rural adolescents whose parents demand them to their financial support soon [36,42], which initiate unhealthy teachers' stereotypical [39,40], high dropout, and low retention [23,41,45], and shortage of skilled labor [11,18,23,33,46].…”

“…and relevant to assess the higher VET learning environment that recourse millions of students who are accounted for the valuable, necessary competent human capital that determine the genuine development of the nation [23,36,43]. As a result, the government is striving to promote the VET through financial, physical, and human resources and persuading the advantage of VET the opening door for early employment [28,42,48], although the benefit reduces through time [42,48,49]. Despite the efforts, the higher VET could not produce adequate competent graduates due to an immature curriculum and learning environment, which possess outdated facilities that depress the learning motivation of students [11,33,36,40], which results for non-involved, a non-engaged, non-competent graduate that unseemly for the modern technological, the industrial employee need [33,[45][46][47][48].…”

“…Explicitly, this study explores the learning motivation of VET students in Ethiopia from East Africa and China from East Asia, where studies stipulated that VET students are dropping out from the program, possess lower learning engagement, competency, and performance after joining the workforce [11,19,[22][23][24][25]. The current study underpins self-determination theory (SDT) from other motivation theories since the view is concerned with the motivation behind their field of choice, focusing on the degree to which an individual's behavior is self-determined, and their SD motivation is a paramount framework in work-related research, influencing performance, satisfaction, commitment, and fostering competency [7,15,[26][27][28]. Besides understanding the application of SDT as an approach to exploring VET students learning motivation, the present study has supplementary significance by adding literature regarding SDT in non-western countries context [c.f.…”

Using E-modules to Support EFL/ESL Learning in Asian Contexts: A Systematic Literature Review

“…It is noteworthy that higher vocational students worldwide have been increasingly grown in recent years. Take China for example, according to official statistics released in 2019, vocational colleges taking 52.94% of the total of higher education institutions, hosting nearly 13 million students, accounting for 42.25% of the total tertiary student population (Juan & Nair, 2022). Consequently, there emerges a potential necessity for English language learning within this demographic in the realm of EFL/ESL education.…”