A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework to Assess the Sustainable Development of Schools within a University: Application to a Chinese University

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

 

Congratulations on the topic. It is highly valuable for the contemporary higher education system. I look forward to seeing other research on the same topic.

Kind regards,

The Reviewer

Author Response

Thank you very much for positive evaluation on our paper, we have revised the manuscript. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall the manuscript is well written. However, there is a need to better justify the various indicators of sustainable development. 
Why are those specific measures selected? For example is the number of academics really a good indicator? Should not something life academic to student ratio be used instead. 

A comprehensive discussion on the choice of factors and indicators need to be provided. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. Our response is described as follows.

[1] Yes. The selection of indicators is an important segment, especially when this framework is genuinely applied to the evaluation and decision-making of university administrators. [2] The indicators we used include all available data in the archival records of Wuhan University. We have added some discussions on the indicators selecting in Section 3.1. in Line 205−228. [3]  You are correct. The ratio between teachers and students may be a better indicator. But we find that the number of teachers has also been used to evaluate the efficiency of a department (e.g., Abd et al., 2013 Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.07.124). [4] One contribution of our research is the proposed Stability Analysis (as described in Section 2.4). We found that the model results are relatively robust and do not depend heavily on selecting certain indicators (Line 287−292). Therefore, we believe that replacing the number of teachers with the teacher-student ratio will not significantly impact the results. [5] We acknowledge that the indicators used in this study may not be optimal. However, the focus of this paper is to propose a framework (as described in Section 2) for assessing the development of each school. The application to Wuhan University is just an example to show how this framework works. The discussion of the optimal solution for indicator selection is beyond the scope of this analysis and will be our future work. We already emphasized this limitation in the paper. Please see Lines 319−324.

Reviewer 3 Report

Thanks for submitting this manuscript. It addresses a topic of great interest. I had really enjoyed reading this paper. I do have some questions and comments.

1. In terms of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the weight, could you please provide more information about the process? Who developed AHP? What field of research had applied this process? Why you select it in the paper?

2. Since the current study applied Wuhan University as an example, please add a section with basic introduction of the university. 

3. The study incorporated 28 indicators, could you please briefly discuss why these indicators were selected? Is it based on previous studies? what are these studies?

4. The current study was conducted within social science and humanities related schools in one university. The results could not represent the circumstances of other nature science or majors. As you suggested in the future research section, you could utilize data collected from other disciplines or major. Therefore, please add a limitation section of the paper. 

5. The current study utilize data of 2020, which is a unique academic year due to Covid. There's transition from face-to-face to online education, and quarantines of universities. So probably future studies could consider use data before and after covid to see whether there's any difference of the results. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your comments, our response is described as follows.

Q1: In terms of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the weight, could you please provide more information about the process? Who developed AHP? What field of research had applied this process? Why you select it in the paper?

Our response: Thank you for your comments. We added more information. Please see Lines 113−118.

Q2: Since the current study applied Wuhan University as an example, please add a section with basic introduction of the university.

Our response: Thank you for the suggestion. We provided a brief introduction to Wuhan University in Section 3. Please see Lines 192−197.

Q3: The study incorporated 28 indicators, could you please briefly discuss why these indicators were selected? Is it based on previous studies? what are these studies?

Our response: Thank you for your comments. The indicators we used include all available data in the archival records of Wuhan University. We have added some discussions on the selection of indicators in Section 3.1. Please see Lines 205−228.

Q4:The current study was conducted within social science and humanities related schools in one university. The results could not represent the circumstances of other nature science or majors. As you suggested in the future research section, you could utilize data collected from other disciplines or major. Therefore, please add a limitation section of the paper.

Our response: You are correct. [1] The framework established in this study (as described in Section 2) has no discipline limitation. [2] To indicate how this framework works, we selected the schools of social science and humanities at Wuhan University for application. We did not consider those schools of natural science because there is a great difference between schools of nature sciences and schools of social science and humanities. For example, most schools of natural sciences have much more funding than that in schools of social science and humanities, which can lead to a remarkable rise in scores. Such detailed research is beyond the scope of this study, and we will conduct more in-depth research in the future. [3] We added limitations and prospects. See Line 324−326.

Q5: The current study utilize data of 2020, which is a unique academic year due to Covid. There's transition from face-to-face to online education, and quarantines of universities. So probably future studies could consider use data before and after covid to see whether there's any difference of the results.

Our response: Thank you for comment and suggestion. Our model can evaluate both the differences among schools and the development level of the same school in different years. We will conduct further research on this topic in the future. We added some discussion. Please see Lines 326−331.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for responding to the comments and making required changes where relevant.