An Integrated Fuzzy Structured Methodology for Performance Evaluation of High Schools in a Group Decision-Making Problem

Abstract

Evaluating and ranking schools are noteworthy for parents of students and upstream institutions (in Iran, the Ministry of Education). In this process, quantitative criteria, including educational activities, human resources, space and equipment, and administrative-financial indicators, are commonly investigated. This process is carried out only by the upstream institutions and the view of the system from the perspective of another stakeholder, namely, the students' parents, are ignored and qualitative-judgmental indicators do not involve the school evaluation results. Consequently, in this study, we used the opinions of five parents of students and five experienced school administrators to capture the perspectives of both key system stakeholders. In addition, to perform a more comprehensive analysis, we added three qualitative criteria that are less noticed within the problem (social environment, health, and students), along with their sub-criteria to the criteria obtained from the research background. We eliminated the less influential sub-criteria using the Delphi technique and continued the study with 10 criteria and 53 sub-criteria. Then, using two widely used methods in this field, AHP and TOPSIS, we determined the weight of the sub-criteria and the ranking based on the experts' views. In addition, to deal with the ambiguity in experts' judgments, we transformed the crisp data into fuzzy data. We applied the proposed methodology to rank 15 schools in Tehran, Iran. The results showed that the proposed quantitative criteria significantly impact the schools ranking. In addition, according to the sensitivity analysis results, it was found that ignoring the views of the system from another stakeholder can distort the results. Finally, directions for future research were suggested based on current research limitations.