How do you think it should be addressed?
First of all, each school must determine its own mission and duty and what kind of students it wants to develop. In the US, there are 4 major groups of qualities students should achieve before graduation: knowledge of their majors; reasoning skills; general knowledge; and ethics.
Of these, general knowledge means communication and problem-solving skills; working knowledge of certain technical means; as well as knowledge, awareness and assessment of history, global issues, and diverse cultures. This area I think is still absent in training programmes in Vietnam.
Of course, no student can achieve all of these qualities, so each department or each school must decide for themselves which of them are essential to their own students. In addition, universities also need to develop a close link with outside companies in order to know whether their students meet real-life demands.
What assessment methods do you think Vietnam should use in order to evaluate accurately teacher and student performance?
In Vietnam, students just have to go through final exams without being assigned homework or other projects throughout their whole studying process. This is also due to the fact that teachers have to teach too many classes and don’t have teaching assistants to help them grade assignments.
As for teachers, they are only evaluated periodically every several months or every year. Through our investigation at some universities in Vietnam, we observe that they don’t have incentives for teachers to improve their teaching skills, training quality and research capacity, since promotions and salary increases often depend on the amount of content delivered and seniority rather than professional achievements and research abilities.
So I think universities need to develop reward systems to recognise and award those who have made achievements and innovations in teaching and learning practice and research. In the US, teachers are regularly evaluated by students, colleagues, superiors and professional and independent assessment organisations in such areas as lesson planning, teaching methodology, and contributions to school or department development.
Through these assessments, those who don’t meet requirements are sent to teaching and learning quality development centres to improve their capacities. Universities themselves also regularly organise pedagogical training for their teaching staffs.
So in my opinion, Vietnam should establish such learning and teaching, as well as quality assessment centres to handle the assessment task and help schools improve the quality of teachers and students.
Lan Huong – posted August 8, 2007 VietNamNet
