Quality Assessment in Vocational Education Based on a Hierarchical Classification Technique

Abstract

According to the laws of education in Thailand, the Office for National Education Standards and Quality Assessment is responsible for assessing the external educational institutes in order to develop the quality and educational standards. The external quality assessment reports are represented in both structured and unstructured data. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of unstructured data, i.e., to automatically classify strength and weakness points. We propose and evaluate two different classification models: Flat Classification and Hierarchical Classification. Three algorithms, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Decision Tree, were used in the experiments. The results showed that classification viathe Hierarchical Classification model by using the SVM yielded the best performance. The classification of strength and weakness points yielded the F-measure equal to 0.843 and 0.893, respectively. The proposed approach can be applied as a decision support function for quality assessment in vocational education.