Conceptualization of Notions and Formation of Quality Indicators of Educational Services Lev I. Fishman

The relevance of the research topic is caused by insufficiently high quality and competitiveness of educational services in the Russian Federation. One of the reasons for this is imperfection of methodological approaches to formation of indicators of qualitative results of providing educational services. Issue statement: the quality of educational services is understood in different ways both by researchers and by various participants of the services market. This creates problems in formation of quality indicators of educational services and decision-making by all concerned parties. The research purposes consist in conceptualization of notions, which are related to the quality of educational services, and development of a system of indicators of their evaluation, reflecting interests of services users, their producers, and management bodies. The research methods include methods of scientific abstraction and concretization of generic concepts of quality, summaries, groupings and ranking of quality indicators of educational services, their clustering. The methods of mathematical statistics and theory of probability are also used. The results and key conclusions: conceptualization is carried out and the difference in the notions, related to the quality of educational services, is revealed. The system of quality indicators of services of higher professional education is formed, their ranking and clustering is carried out. A gap between the consumer quality of educational services and the quality of services that are used in practice has been established.