earticle

영어

The most prominent mission to provide a good quality of educational service is very important for every educational institutions in all over the world. The Chinese government also has set priority on education as a strategic competitiveness and various policies have been carried out so as to achieve educational modernization. As a result, there has been a remarkable progress in educational service quality. However, a number of problems still remained to be solved such as increasing financial outcome and extreme pressure put on the students since there are limited space in the best senior schools and universities. This study investigates whether students’ perceived educational service quality would enhance students’ loyalty intention towards the school through students’ satisfaction and commitment. The study adopts a structural equation modeling approach. Data were collected at five major middle schools in the city of Nanyang which is located in the Henan province of China. Findings of this study are generally in line with existing literature and the results are as follow. Students’ perceived service quality has a significant positive influence on students’ satisfaction but not on the student commitment and loyalty. But students’ satisfaction and commitment have a significant positive influence on loyalty. These results show that perceived service quality has a direct influence on students’ satisfaction, but commitment and loyalty is only mediated by satisfaction. In short, educational service quality itself brings about students’ satisfaction yet their commitment and loyalty require satisfaction as an antecedent. One of the major implications of this study is that those educational institutions that understand consumer-oriented principles may have a better chance of satisfying the wants and needs of their students more effectively and therefore may have achieved educational vision. In spite of a number of important findings, however, there are a number of limitations to be considered. Although the sample size is large enough to apply structural equation modeling, the data for this study was collected only in one city. Therefore, its representativeness is carefully analyzed and applied in effort to improve educational service quality Further implications for educational institutions and research directions are discussed.