Between Education Practice and General Theorizing in Higher Education

Experience of University Evaluation and Faculty Development Practice

Abstract

　 University education is entering an age of drastic change as shown by such innovations as the introduction of university evaluation, regulations to make Faculty Development（FD）obligatory, and so on. University staff are expected to develop and implement various ideas aimed at the unremitting improvement of educational activities. The diversity of such activities should be sufficiently wide to enable them to be theoretically integrated or brought together into a more general expression or theory. With that aim in mind, various kinds of data related to such activities should be collected. Regarding quantitative data, the norm is to summarize individual items of data into statistical form. In the educational situation, where the responsibility for improving lectures falls on individual teachers, we need to be able to fully comprehend not only quantitative statistics but also information regarding the way in which individual sets of data deviate from the given statistics. Moreover, it may be possible to obtain from qualitative data some useful strategies that will help us to conduct similar practices in similar contexts, even though the resulting implications might be less reliable and more prone to bias than in the case of quantitative data. An effective method of utilizing data from individual case studies is to connect it with a higher-order framework, such as the context of an entire university education system or with a theoretical model in a given research field. It is desirable for us to continue to refine and familiarize ourselves with qualitative methods in higher education research.