Abstract
This paper presents the findings of a national survey of student satisfaction with undergraduate teaching in a sample of universities and colleges in China. The results show that while a high proportion of academic staff participates in undergraduate teaching, levels of student satisfaction are low. The lowest levels of student satisfaction are found in research-intensive universities. The study concludes that the main causes of this situation are: a shortage of well-qualified academic staff; the pressure on academic staff to focus their time on research output; policies and practices that emphasize research-orientation in the evaluation of academic staff performance; and poor support for teaching in terms of both support staff and teaching facilities.
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Notes
The ‘973 Program’ is China's on-going keystone National Basic Research Program, which was approved by the Chinese government in June 1997, and is organized and implemented by the Ministry of Science and Technology. More detail can be found in http://www.973.gov.cn/English/Index.aspx.
Project ‘985’ was initially proposed by Mr Jiang Zheming when he addressed the 100th anniversary of Beijing University in May 1998, and thus the project is named after the time of that event.
Among the 70 institutions, 66 gave responses, and one other university volunteered, and therefore the sample in this phase consists of 67 institutions.
The term ‘scissors gap’ originated from the poor economic situation of the 1920s in the Soviet Union when the price of industrial products was much higher than their value, while that of agricultural products was lower. This results in the shape of the price–time graph looking like the blades of a pair of opened scissors.
Since the schemes of higher institution classification in the two countries are very different as stated previously, the comparison cannot be conducted one-to-one throughout the typology.
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Acknowledgements
This research is sponsored by the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education of China, and by the Educational Science Planning Committee of Jiangsu Province. The authors also thank other participants in this survey including Professor F. Gong, Professor X. Yu, Dr. S. Jin, Ph.D. student F. Zhang and 12 other research students in the Department of Education of Nanjing University.
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Zhang, H., Foskett, N., Wang, D. et al. Student Satisfaction with Undergraduate Teaching in China — A Comparison between Research-intensive and Other Universities. High Educ Policy 24, 1–24 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2010.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/hep.2010.23