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Evaluating the curriculum for Bachelor of English at SFL

发布时间:2018-03-30
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CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY

  1. Research questions
  • To what extent are alumni and employers completely satisfied with the curriculum for Bachelor of English at SFL?
  • To what extent do knowledge, skills and attitudes that the curriculum provided to learners meet employers’ expectation and the requirement of workforces?
  • What are the strengths and drawbacks of the current curriculum for Bachelor of English Language at SFL?
    1. Subjects of the study

To conduct sufficient evidences for “evaluating the curriculum for Bachelor of English at SFL- TNU”, this paper focused on two main subject groups including alumni and employers.

  1. Alumni

Seventy graduates attending the Bachelor of English program in the academic year 2009 at SLF is the first group to gather information for the thesis. The reason why I choose this subject is that these graduates have left the school for a year, they have strong feedbacks whether what the whole training program provided them in accordance with what they want or not . Besides, after a year of working in the reality, they probably assess whether knowledge, skills which they obtained from the curriculum has been helpful for their work's requirements. Furthermore, to avoid bias point of views caused by unexpected external elements, I also carried out interviews on three alumni who are considered as good quality students so as to gather their feedbacks about how the results gained from the curriculum help them in the reality as well as their satisfaction about the training program.

  1. Employers

Besides alumni, as stated in the title of this thesis, another subject I would like to focus on is employers who have been hiring graduates from SLF as employees. The questionnaires were sent to eight companies, organizations located at Thai Nguyen and Hanoi including four companies in Thai Nguyen (International School – TNU, Masan JSC, AMA English Center, Pyramid JSC) and four companies in Hanoi (Langmaster, Hanaro TNS, Childfund International, Templaza JSC. It is important to mention that School of Foreign Languages has the mission to train human resource for the Northern mountainous area in which Thai Nguyen is as the center, however, in the trend of job competitiveness, numerous students have moved to the capital to find job opportunities. Besides, some of them pursued their career in Thai Nguyen and other industrial center at the mountainous region. This was proven by the telephone surveys of alumni jobs that I conducted before this study. That is the reason why I paid attention to companies and organizations in the Thai Nguyen and Hanoi. Furthermore, as the same reason for interviewing alumni, three employers were addressed some questions in the convenient interview in order to generate reliability for the thesis.

  1. Data collection instruments

Data in this thesis were simultaneously collected by using a combination of questionnaires and interviews procedures in order to guarantee the thesis’s objectiveness.

  1. Questionnaires

“A questionnaire is a set of systematically structured questions used by a researcher to get needed information from respondents” (Harry, 2009). Richard also defined questionnaire is as an instrument used for gathering respondent’s comment on a wide range of issues (Richard, p301).

The benefit of this instrument is that “easy to administer and information can be obtained from large number of respondents” (Richard, p301). It can be sent to lots of individuals at the same time and easy to fill out. Beside, a questionnaire could include various questions covering multiplicity of aspects which the evaluator wants to gather. Also, it is designed logically in order that analysis of results is quick and easy. In addition, this instrument assured convenience and willingness of respondents with the commit to secure of their personal information. In brief, questionnaires of all kinds may turn out to be very useful in gathering large scale information on the needs of students (Henerson, Morris and Fitz- Gibbon 1987, quoted by Brown, p51).

In this thesis, questionnaires are designed for both alumni and employers.

The questionnaire for alumni consists of two parts: part A and part B.

Part A includes six questions focusing on the individual information of alumni. The first two questions were designed to ask their names and gender. The next two questions aims to gather telephone numbers and emails in order that the evaluator gets easy to contact to respondents. The last two questions are to identify their current job and their company’s address. However, to make the respondent feel comfortable to get start with the questionnaire, these two questions are not required to response in case the alumni have not found jobs yet.

Part B consists of fourteen questions based on eight criteria for evaluation a curriculum which was stated in “ The criteria for Curriculum evaluation of Thai Nguyen University”, issued by Decision of TNU 474/QD - May 22nd, 2012.

Five- point Likert scale (1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = neutral, 4 = disagree, 5 = strongly disagree) was used for evaluation. The first seven questions include small items ( 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc) to evaluate objectives and output standard, curriculum structure and content, teaching and learning strategies, student assessment, the staffs and faculties, learners, infrastructure and learning materials. Question 8 has four item aims to collect opinion of alumni on whether subjects in the curriculum framework meet their work’s requirement. Moreover, question 8 also has three open - ended questions to ask alumni whether the curriculum should be added with more subjects or any subject needs to be revised or increased its duration. Question 9 has five scales which ask the alumni how their satisfaction to the curriculum. The rest question was designed to get the alumni’s additional comments to the curriculum.

Questionnaire for employers includes three parts: part A and part B.

To get easy to contact with the respondents, part A was designed with two sections. Section 1 has six questions aiming to gather the respondent’s information including name, gender, current occupation as well as telephone number and email. Section 2 is used for collect organization or business information consisting of organization name, address, phone number and email.

Part B includes 11 questions to collect employers’ opinion about the curriculum for the Bachelor of English at SFL. The first three questions are to attain the general information of the organization which includes sector, field and size.

From question 4 to 6, employers are asked to evaluate the quality of knowledge, skills and attitudes of SFL English Bachelor graduates following five scales (very poor, poor, fair, good, excellent), in which, question 4 is for evaluation knowledge and the next two questions are also respondents’ judgments in skills and attitude. To gather information about subjects in curriculum framework to identify how these subjects meet the needs of employment, question 7 includes a catalogue of subjects in the curriculum framework for Bachelor of English so as to employers can judge how each subject meet their needs. To modify for question 7, question 8 was design to collect more comments about what subject should be added to provide essential knowledge for job requirements. Question 9 aims to find out how well employers satisfy with the curriculum for Bachelor of English at SFL. The last two questions aim to collect employers’ comment on their expectation about skills, knowledge and attitudes which the university should equip for students and gather their additional comments which contribute to develop the current curriculum of Bachelor of English.

  1. Interviews

Although questionnaire is a common method in research, it has numerous disadvantages. According to Richard, information obtained from questionnaires may be “fairly superficial or imprecise and will often need follow – up to gain a fuller understanding of what respondents intend” (Richard, p60). Thus, interview is considered as another procedure accomplish with questionnaire to assure reliability of the research.

“Interviews allow for more in - depth exploration of issues than is possible with questionnaire” (Richard, p301). In addition, interviews were also allows to assess attitudes of participants, especially in case of need to gather point of individual views or comments. “Individually interviews allow for gathering personal responses and views privately. This confidentiality can, in turn, lead to insight into the “real” opinion of the participants involves” (Brown, 49).

Bear in mind strengths and weaknesses of two procedures, interview and questionnaire, I decided to use both of these instruments to ensure the reliability for the research.

The formal interview is conducted with 2 groups of participants including alumni and employer. Questions for interview were designed similar

Interview for alumni includes three questions. The first question is to gather comments of alumni about whether knowledge, skills and attitudes involved in the curriculum meet the requirements of the alumni’s current job or not. The second one aims to determine what knowledge, skills, and attitudes met their expectation and what did not. The next question asked participants express their judgments on strengths and drawbacks of the curriculum to identify what aspects need to improve and what aspects need to overcome. The last question inquired feedbacks of participants about what aspects the curriculum needs to be provided to develop and to be relevant to the reality.

Group of employers was asked 4 questions. The first question is to determine how English Bachelor graduates at SFL meet the society’s requirement. The second question aims to ask if employers have to train graduates of SFL prior they undertake job. The third one is to ask employers about strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum. The last one aimed to gather recommendations of recruiters to improve the current curriculum.

  1. Procedures of data collection

The questionnaire was carried out with 100 students in the last week of March, 2014. In order to ensure convenience for both the evaluator and respondents, I constructed an online questionnaire. Before sending the instrument, I called to respondents to provide them information and aims of this thesis and expressed hope to get their cooperation. After 2 weeks, I gathered total 70 responses. Beside, as for the subjects of the thesis, I also sent the form to 8 employers after I contacted them and explain the rationales of my research with the hope that they were willing to assist.

The interview was administered to three graduates in which 70 respondents of the survey questionnaire. The interview’s schedule was set up in convenience for participants. After participants felt comfortable and confident to respond, the interviewer started with introducing the thesis’ background and asked the interviewee’s introduce themselves (name, organization). Then, interview questions were asked one by one to gather interviewee’s feedbacks. At the end of the interview, the author give thank again for the cooperation and assistance of interviewees.

The whole of conversation were noted - taking as evidences for the research.

  1. Data analysis

The data from questionnaires and interviews was collected with the help of Google Docs program.

To judge qualitative data, frequencies (f) and percentage (%) value were demonstrated. The percentage value is also illustrated by charts and tables in order to conduct descriptive statistics.

The data from interview was analyzed by grouping answers of different participants into the same categories of evaluation’s aspects to answer the research questions.

To assure private information for respondents and participants, the data gathered from questionnaire and interview was dealt with anonymously. Instead, the author used Alumni 1, 2, 3 or Employer 1, 2, 3 to make reference to the name of participants.

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