Internal Evaluation:Appropriate Strategic for Quality Evaluation and Improvement of Management in Departments at Universities(The Case of Iran)

Abstract

During the last two decades, the higher education management has faced different challenges; on one side the increasing growth in social demand for entering higher education, quantitative extension, decrease or stagnation in allocated financial resources and the increase in demand for responsibility, accountability and transparency of the academic affairs and on the other side quality maintenance, improvement and assurance. So that it forced the academic management to evaluate its performance toward the quality promotion and assurance. In line with this issue, the international studies and national experiences shows that due to the nature of higher education, the internal evaluation approach which is the basis of quality assurance systems at universities of the world is appropriate to evaluate all the main factors of academic system namely its management and organization and it also has an important role in quality improvement of management at all Iran's academic system levels (amongst them is the educational department which is one of the main and operational levels) that its outcome is obtaining the maximum efficiency and effectiveness of the department performance.So alongside introducing the concept and theoretical and practical principles of internal evaluation in higher education, this paper attempts to present the application of internal evaluation for quality improvement of management in departments at universities. The research design applied in this study is meta-analysis and the statistical population includes 296 reports of departments’ internal evaluation and 90 samples are selected and analyzed based on the purposeful sampling method. The meta-analysis of the results of the management process evaluation in the internal evaluation reports of departments at universities is based on 8 main factors including development plans, functions, regulations and internal laws, meeting schedules and the presence of the faculty members, head of department, extra-group activities, funding and coordination of human resource and facilities. The results indicate that management process quality of departments at universities is rather desirable and requires planning for its improvement. Therefore, based on the results of the analysis, recommendations are presented for management improvement in departments at universities.