Evaluation of Compliance with Policy Commitments:Constructing an Evaluation Indicator System for Digital Education
Digital education is the core element and strong support of the strategy of a powerful nation in education,and its scientific evaluation has become an important issue of priority.At present,the construction of the evaluation index system of digital education mainly follows the logics of theory,practice and policy.From the perspective of education law,education is more likely to develop and produce practical effects within the framework of policy logic in the form of the state's exercise of public power,and the setup of indicators for digital education from the policy logic faces two types of risks,namely,"deviation of the evaluation results from the policy objectives"and"deviation of the evaluation results from the feelings of the citizens".To prevent and narrow the two types of deviation,this paper,from the innovative perspective of policy commitment,considers the policy of digital education as a contract of commitment between the government and the citizens,where the policy goal is both content of the government's commitment and the target of its performance.As a result,the citizens become the important subject of monitoring and evaluation of its performance,and the evaluation of digital education is transformed into an assessment of the results of the policy performance.Further,by selecting eight policy texts related to digital education at the national level that are still in force as the object of analysis,this paperuses Nvivo11 software to code the commitments made in the articles to form a system of indicators for evaluating compliance with digital education.It consists of three first-level indicators,namely,"supply commitments","demand commitments"and"environmental commitments",and 12 second-level indicators.It also envisions three major application scenarios,namely,evaluating compliance with citizens'monitoring,optimizing the accountability mechanism,and promoting the setting of policy agendas.Compared with previous studies,this paper makes new value propositions in the following four aspects.First,it promotes theoretical innovation and expands the boundaries of interpretation and application of contract theory.Second,it promotes a conceptual shift to strengthen the government's responsibility for policy compliance and citizens'right to monitor.Third,to promote development consensus,it uses compliance evaluation as a communication link between the government and citizens to facilitate the formation of social development consensus.Fourth,it strengthens development support,emphasizing the process review function of compliance evaluation and providing a basis for policy adjustment.This paper uses contract theory to construct the endogenous logic of"government compliance and citizen evaluation",designs a compliance evaluation index system around the commitment clauses in the digital education policy,and looks forward to the application of compliance evaluation indexes with citizen supervision as the core,which is conducive to bridging the cognitive differences among the academia,the government,and the citizens,and helps promote the evaluation of digital education.It is expected to make theoretical and practical contributions to the digital transformation of education in China.
digital educationa powerful nation in educationcontract theorypolicy commitmentcompliance evaluation