Abstract:

Recent changes in educational policies in Vietnam aimed to improve educational quality, such as the effectiveness of teachers and school principals of general education. Most recent evaluation—annual personnel evaluation in 2006 and standards-based evaluation in 2009—were introduced and implemented. At the end of school year 2010-2011, standards-based evaluation, helping school principals with working for meeting professional standards, was first applied together with personnel evaluation. On one hand, literature showed that methods to evaluate should be agreed by most educators whether evaluation aimed to evaluate quality or to recognized status. Especially, introducing an appropriate and agreeable type of evaluation would be more feasible and effective in promoting the educational leaders and meeting the requirements.

This study examined the attitudes of teachers, principals, and top administrators in Dong Thap province in the southern Vietnam. Specially, it sought to determine their attitudes toward evaluating school principals in six different areas, as required developing an improved instrument for the evaluation. There were a total of 1,023 participants, including 980 teachers, 32 school principals, and 11 administrators. They were administered a survey consisting of six requirements and demographic information about the respondents.

The respondents rated their level of agreement with each requirement using a seven point Likert type scale. In overall mean for all respondents’ agreement with the requirements was 4.96, suggesting there was a high level of confidence with the substance of the requirements. However, there was variance among the subgroup responses. Additionally, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was utilized in order to determine if there was a significant difference among the means of agreements from teachers, school principals, and administrators towards the evaluation. An one-way ANOVA with alpha of .05 (error 5 times out of 100) was utilized to determine variables: positions, gender, ages, educational degree, knowledge on educational administration, and experience of teachers. The results, which tested the null hypotheses if there was no difference between among the variables, showed the significance of position and experience. The result of 0.007 on position (p<.05) was statistically significant. In other word, the null hypotheses if there was no difference between positions—teachers, principals, and administrator—was rejected. The responses of participants were diverse among teachers (SD=4.96), administrators (SD=4.55), and school principal (SD=5.26). Similarly, the result of 0.024 on years of working (p<.05) was statistically significant. In other word, the null hypotheses if there was no difference between working years was rejected. The agreements of participants with less working years showed their lower agreements in comparison with those with more experiences, such as years of 1-5, 6-10, over 10 were 4.86, 5.02, and 5.04, respectively.

This suggests that there was a need to improve communication between teachers and administrators, and that the evaluation of administrators, including the criteria and instrumentation, should be further examined.