Multicriteria analysis of the quality of teaching process in higher education: how to evaluate implementation of critical thinking

Abstract

One of the main goals of any higher education system is developing students’ critical thinking. Critical thinking contributes to decision-making and problem-solving skills, whether for professional or personal purposes. Teaching, on the other hand, has been largely influenced by new information technologies which have changed some of the related concepts and tools. The quality of the teaching process is multidimensional which is why no single unit of its measurement has been developed yet, in spite of numerous surveys that have collected massive amounts of information from the existing practice. The aim of this paper is to establish the most appropriate higher education quality measure, which would consist of all relevant indicators from different aspects, including implementation of critical thinking in the teaching process, weighting by two main groups of participants in the process - teachers and students. Multicriteria decision-making has been recognised as a suitable framework for achieving this goal. In fact, the problem of measuring teaching staff performance could be set up as a classical problem of multicriteria decision-making. With this approach the quality of teaching process should be simultaneously estimated by n quality assurance criteria and in accordance with those criteria m alternatives (professors) would be ranked or estimated.