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Yin Cheong Cheng: Director and Professor and Wai Ming Tam is Lecturer at The Centre for Research and Development, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong
Wai Ming Tam: Lecturer at The Centre for Research and Development, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This article is one of the reports of an ongoing research project on "Educational quality in Hong Kong secondary schools indicators and organizational determinants" that is supported by an Earmarked Research Grant awarded from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Government to the first author. The authors appreciate the financial support of the Council.
In the past decade, following rapid economic development, the education systems of most countries or areas in the Asia-Pacific region have been expanded quickly. Currently, the people in this region are concerned with not only education quantity but also education quality. For example, in Hong Kong, a number of policy efforts have been put into improvement of different aspects of education such as curriculum, language teaching, student guidance, student streaming, management, teacher-student ratio, physical environment, and teacher education (Education and Manpower Branch and Education Department, 1991; Education Commission, 1984-1992). Although these efforts aim at improving education quality and discharging accountability, they are suffering from poor understanding of the complex nature of education quality and lack of a system of education standards and indicators for directing practices and monitoring performance. The effects of these efforts are often problematic and doubted by the public. This seems to be a serious problem when compared with the huge investment in the education system.
Recently, China and some other rapidly developing societies in the Asia-Pacific region have been facing similar problems of education quality in development of education. Also, there are different types of educational reform in search of education quality in developed countries such as the USA, UK, and Australia (Cheng, 1994a, 1996). Responding to the rapidly growing concern about education quality in the international and local contexts, this paper aims at developing a framework of multi-models of quality in education for facilitating practice, supporting policy making, and developing research agendas.
General conception of education quality
In the management literature, the term quality has different meanings and has been variously defined as excellence (Peters and...