Design of a Metrics for Teaching Quality on Cram Schools Business

Abstract: Due to the pressure of fierce competition, many parents worry about their children being unable to compete with their peers. Besides the regular school class, they have engaged their kids at the cram school in order to strengthen the performance of their academic or creative art, so they might have a better foundation. The cram school business thus becomes a unique and prosperous educational business. Due to the low entry barrier, many companies have joining this business. However, the declining birth rate makes cram school business facing decreasing students number in recent years. Therefore, developing effective practices to improve students retention rate and to improve competitive advantages are becoming critical for managers of cram schools. The first step to change the cram school competition environment from cost-driven to quality-driven is to establish a way to measure the teaching quality — as there is no metrics during the past few decades in this domain. This work proposes a metrics based on the theory developed by Marsh and elaborated their idea to design a teaching quality assessment mechanism. Experts in academia and cram schools were interviewed to revise the proposed framework and the associated weighted values of elements in all dimensions of the framework were further calculated using Analytic Network Process (ANP) process. Questionnaires were distributed to representative teachers and supervisors in the cram school to justify the proposed metrics. The results show that this proposed metrics are valuable to the managers and could be used to improve students retention rate.

Key words: teaching quality; Analytic Network Process (ANP); cram school

        JEL code: I210