Review of New Model of Quality Improvement in Educational Systems

Since the turn of the new century, there have been drastic impacts from economic globalization, advances in information technology, international market competitions, and rapidly increasing local social-political demands on nearly every country in the world. Facing up these impacts and challenges, numerous education reforms have been initiated in the Asia-Pacific Region and other places. According to Cheng, the world-wide education reforms are experiencing three waves since the 1970s. The three waves of reforms are mainly based on different changes and theories of education effectiveness, and they result in the employment of different strategies and approaches to changing schools and education. This paper aims to review the characteristics and changes of quality assurance in the first and second waves and then explain why the coming initiatives for quality assurance should be moving towards the third wave which emphasizes strongly Future Quality Assurance in terms of ensuring the relevance to new education functions in the new century as well as the relevance to the new changes of education.

Keywords:

Quality , Education , Quality Assurance , Effectiveness