Quality assurance in education: Internal, interface, and future

This paper aims to point out that the world-wide education reforms for education quality are experiencing three waves based on different paradigms and theories of education quality and school effectiveness, and they result in different strategies and approaches to education assurance. The first wave of school reforms and initiatives focuses mainly on internal quality assurance and makes an effort to improve internal school performance, particularly the methods and processes of teaching and learning. The second wave emphasizes interface quality assurance in terms of organizational effectiveness, stakeholders’ satisfaction and market competitiveness and makes an effort to ensure satisfaction and accountability to the internal and external stakeholders. The coming improvement initiatives should be moving towards the third wave, which emphasizes strongly future quality assurance in terms of relevance to the new paradigm of education concerning contextualized multiple intelligences (CMI), globalization, localization and individualization. Copyright © 2003 Emerald Group Publishing Limited.