Assessment reform in China:

A respond to the international trend in the new century

Professor Gao Lingbiao

South China Normal University

Introduction

China has the world’s largest education system. According to the 2003 statistics on school and university enrolment from the Ministry of Education (MOE) in China, there are 247,365,300 children and young people in kindergarten, schools and universities. Each of the school levels in China are the size of the full population of many countries. The following are the 2003 statistics from the MOE official website[1].

Table 1  Number of students at different level of education in China (MOE, 2004)

This makes reform particularly difficult despite the centralized education system. This educational system was reorganized first in 1984 and then in 1993 and the Ministry of Education was renamed the State Education Commission. However the name Ministry of Education in Beijing remains. According to Wang (1994) with the implementation of universal 9 years of compulsory education, the improvement of educational quality and standards became a new focus of attention in China. The national monitoring system was just taking shape in the 1980s. Assessment was seen to serve the development of moral, intellectual and physical ability. Public examinations at primary level were cancelled. In the government document[2], school based assessment was re-emphasized and encouraged to play an important role in controlling and improving the quality of student learning. However, schools and local authorities did not follow this policy until the recent reform.

In order to better understand the assessment policy implementation issues, a closer look will be taken at Guangzhou, a city in one of the provinces of China, to see the steps China has made towards reforming the assessment system in recent years. The ongoing processes of globalization have had significant implications for functional and territorial organization and reorganization of human activities in different world regions. China too is moving to reform curriculum and assessment. (Lin, 2003)

The flexible global movement of people and capital has influenced China with more people becoming globally aware. With the advent of technology, more people in China are beginning to see the benefits that might be accrued from working from an international perspective. China has opened its doors more to the world and is moving in the same direction as many countries throughout the world in order to reform its curriculum and assessment systems. The sheer numbers have inhibited the developments in China; however they will learn quickly and adapt to make assessment more humanistic and learner-centred as seen in other countries.

Examinations for entrance to higher education and higher-level technical training have served primarily to control access to severely limited resources, already strained by a shortage of well-prepared teachers, inadequate buildings and equipment and out of date libraries. In the current drive to modernize the Chinese economy, the pendulum of Chinese higher education admission policy has once again swung to an extreme position. According to Zhang and Zhong (2003), Chinese reform has expanded since 1989.

Chinese society has gradually turned its attention to building the socialist market economy. In this context, unprecedented vigour emerges out of education reform. Curriculum reform in elementary and secondary schools has been spreading particularly in Shanghai and several other regions. This is the macro context under which assessment policy is being developed in China.

Policy Development/Political events

Education reform has been traditionally “top down” in China. Almost all the policies come from the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Beijing. In the past, these policies were very detailed and prescriptive. With the introduction of decentralization in educational policy making, the central government wished to “change the over centralization in curriculum management. School curriculum … under the control at national, local and school levels to fit in with the conditions of students, schools and regions” (MOE, 2001, Line no. 2). National policies became more general. They provided educators with big ideas, concepts and principles for reform, targets and standards for school curriculum. In this environment, the provincial Department of Education and city/regional Bureau of Education were responsible for developing the local policies. Since the whole country must follow the national policies, the local policies relate to practical rules and strategies, interpretations of ideas and concepts in the central policies, and the regional targets of the reform. At the city/regional level, the district/county Offices of Education do not create new policies or strategies or rules, but they can play a role in the process by developing approaches to implement these reform directives that come from the centre. This decentralized approach to education policy making is summarised in Figure 1.

Insert “Figure 1 Policy process in China” about here

The acting agent of curriculum and assessment reform under the MOE is the “National Centre for School Curriculum and Textbook Development”. There are also a number of “Centre(s) of Curriculum Studies in Basic Education” located in universities. For example, the Beijing Normal University, East China Normal University, South China Normal University, etc., are all associated with the MOE and assist in the development of the central policies. Under the MOE centres there are also local branches named “Research Section of Instructions and Learning” (RSIL) in all levels of educational authorities. Their tasks are mainly related to the development of local policies, while they also assist in the development of central policies on curriculum and assessment. However, the RSIL can only define reforms within the basic education system. This means, in terms of assessment reform, they can only develop policies for within-school tests and examinations and for some public examinations, mainly for the senior secondary entrance and school certification examinations. The most important public examination in China – the university entrance examination is under the charge of another agent under the MOE, the “National Education Examinations Authority”. There are also local authorities of educational examinations to conduct locally the university entrance examination. This examination used to be unified over the whole country but now, under the decentralization policy, it has become a provincial-unified public examination. In summary, the curriculum and evaluation reform originated in two agencies and spread out in two different paths: one was responded for curriculum development and implementation, including the within school assessments; another was responsible to public examination (see figure 2). This, in many times, caused troubles due to the differences ideas and strategies of these two agencies.

Insert “Figure 2 Acting agents of curriculum and assessment reform” about here

Assessment Reform Issues: Problem identification and the national response

Assessment reform in Guangzhou, therefore, had its origins in national curriculum reforms initiated by the Chinese government in response to the challenges facing China in the twenty-first century. Resetting the aims of education to meet the needs of the new century and changing the traditional ways of cultivating future citizens was seen as one of the urgent tasks for Chinese educators. In 1998, a group of about 30 expects from the National Centre for School Curriculum and Textbook Development, University Centres of Curriculum Studies and local Research Sections of Instruction and Learning started to prepare the documents for the reform and these were issued by the Minister of Education in 2001 as the Guide Lines for Curriculum Reform in Basic Education (experimental draft). A team of more than 300 experts from the above agencies then started to develop the National Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (experimental draft) and the National Curriculum Standards for General Senior Secondary Schools (experimental draft), which were published in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

The new national curriculum changed the objectives of school curriculum from focusing only on knowledge delivery to a wider perspective of student development in three dimensions: knowledge and skills, process and methods, and, emotion, attitude and value. Integrated courses such as science, history and social science, practical learning were introduced. The traditional structure of senior secondary curriculum was reorganized into a three-order structure: at the top were 8 learning fields: language and literature, mathematics, science, technology, social science, health and physical education, aesthetic education, and practical learning. Each learning field cover a number of subjects, for example, two subjects, Chinese and foreign language, were under the umbrella learning field “language and literature”; three subjects, physics, chemistry and biology were under the learning field “science”. Each subject included a number of modules which formed the fundamental cell of the senior secondary curriculum. Some of the modules were obligatory; others were optional, while in primary and junior secondary level all courses were still obligatory. (See figure 3).

Insert “Figure 3 Structure of the senior secondary curriculum” about here

The importance of traditional subject knowledge was still taken into account in the new curriculum; however, more attentions were placed to student real life knowledge and capacities in solving practical problems. Teachers were encouraged to make their class more interactive and problem solving related to promote student learning in a more active and enquiry way. The concept of evaluation changed from valuing only student achievement of learning into valuing both the results as well as process of learning. Educators and teachers were invited to develop new approaches and techniques for assessment to liberate students from the heavy pressure of examination.

Test and Examination Reform Efforts

Before the curriculum reform, it was the case that, for almost all teachers, principals and government officers throughout China, student evaluation or assessment was simply viewed as examinations and tests (Gao, 2002). Students needed to pass numerous after-class-tests, module tests, mid-term tests, term tests, year tests, graduation tests and two important public examinations: the senior secondary entrance exams and university entrance exams during his/her school years. All the mid-term tests, term tests and year tests were organized externally and students were ranked according to their scores in these tests beginning in their first year of primary schooling. Students’ scores in these tests also affected their teachers’ income – in almost all schools, the distribution of a bonus (a part of teachers’ incomes in China) among teachers was based on their students’ achievement in tests and examinations. Parents and the society also valued the exam scores and took it as the most important measure of the quality of a school. This pushed teachers and students into an exam-orientated style of teaching and learning (Liu, 1995). Tests and examinations were viewed as “a baton conducting teachers, students and the teaching-learning process” (Gao & Watkins, 2001). However, these examinations focused only on the quantitative aspect of student learning outcomes, used surface exam techniques, mostly, pen-and-paper tests which only measured the quantity of knowledge and lower level objectives of learning (Gao, 2003). The quality of, and approaches to, learning as well as attitude and value of students towards learning were neglected. Evaluation, in this way, became an obstacle to the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning as well as school curriculum in the past decades. With the adoption of the new national curriculum, reform of student assessment became urgent (Gao, 2002).

Because student assessment in China has been heavily externalized and competitive, over emphasising quantitative outcomes and uniform standards, and did not take into account the diversity of students and,  neglected the right and role of students, the MOE decided to change student assessment towards more “diversification/loosening”, similar to the direction of assessment reform in Korea and Japan (Lee, 2000). This movement was described in the Guide Lines for Curriculum Reform in Basic Education (experimental draft) (MOE, 2001), which was the key to assessment reform. It described the reconstruction of a so-called “developmental assessment system” that “focuses on all aspects of learning, uses variety of techniques, and pays more attention to how students progressing their learning (MOE, 2003a)”. The guidelines also state that with the new assessment strategy we need to:

“Build up a new evaluation system aimed at facilitating students’ whole development. It will not only assess students’ achievement, but also discover and develop students’ potential in various ways, identify their needs in development, help them to develop their self-understanding and self-confidences. Evaluation needs to play its role in educating and facilitate students’ development.” (MOE, 2001, Guide Line no.14)

Assessment Quality

In a later government document on the reform of school evaluation and assessment (MOE, 2002), student assessment was divided into two parts: the first part was called “assessment of general quality in learning” and focused on assessing students’ development in a) moral performance, b) civil awareness, c) learning aptitude, d) ability in communication and cooperation, e) physical wellbeing, f) aesthetic literacy. The results of assessment were to be reported by qualitative descriptions and rating grades. The second part focused on the assessment of students’ achievement in: a) knowledge and skills, b) methods and process, c) emotion, attitude and value. The MOE adopted a flexible stance and encouraged schools to set up their own objectives considering both the National Curriculum Standards and the conditions of schools and students. Teachers were encouraged to assess students’ achievement in a dynamic and interactive way through “pen-and-paper tests, operational tests, teacher observation, teacher-student interaction, student demonstrations, student self-evaluation and peer-evaluation (MOE, 2003a)”. Qualitative techniques, especially a learning portfolio were identified as a critical and essential element of student achievement assessment system.

Stop Ranking: Rate

A rating scale such as “excellent, good, medium, pass and fail” was recommended to grade students’ achievement instead of the popular percentage marking scale. This is because the rating scale can give a truer description of the learning quality of students. And, more importantly, the MOE wished to lighten the very serious atmosphere of competition shrouding schools. Ranking of primary and junior secondary students according to their scores or grades in tests and exams was prohibited by the central government for years (MOE, 2000); however, it continued to occur in many schools. The MOE re-emphasised this no-ranking policy in the new reform and tried to create more difficulties for schools to rank, thinking that they would finally stop ranking students by the using the rating scale. Ranking of schools, teachers and students in public examinations was also prohibited. This used to be a hot topic of the local authority, the mass media, the parents and all of the society and caused a powerful push to schools and teachers onto the exam-orientated teaching.

Reduce Frequency

Reducing the frequency of within-school tests and public examinations was another MOE policy of assessment reform. Primary graduation examination used to be a local public examination but is now changed to a school-based exam (2002). The junior secondary graduation examination and the senior secondary entrance examination used to be separate. The later was an important public examination at provincial level. The new policy combined these two into a city/regional level public examination. The senior school certificate examination used to be compulsory and unified at provincial level. Now it has been changed to a selectable public examination. The city bureaus of education could decide whether or not to continue this examination. Moreover, the MOE emphasised the criterion reference character of this exam to lighten the competitive atmosphere and “to depress students from heavy learning loads (MOE, 2001)”.

The new policy also called for changes in pen-and-paper tests in that they should:

²        Focus on assessing students’ abilities in understanding, analyzing and problem solving;

²        Relate closely to students’ daily experience and the society;

²        Use more open-ended items rather than multiple choice and closed items; and

²        Adopt open-book tests if possible. (2003b)

In summary, the MOE tried to promote changes in student assessment from measuring only knowledge and cognitive skills to all-round aspects of intelligence and development; from neglecting the diversity of student characteristics and orientations to taking all these into account; from dealing with students as only passive objects to encouraging them to play a more active roles; from very centralized control and competitive atmosphere to less centralized and more relaxed atmosphere. The new policies, among other things:

a) Introduced a new assessment of “general learning quality”;

b) Emphasised the concept and technique of process assessment;

c) Used rating grades as a substitution of the percentage marks in assessment;

d) Improved the techniques and renewed the contents of pen-and-paper tests;

e) Decreased the frequency and intensity of public examinations; and

f) Stopped ranking students, teachers and schools based on test and exam results.

Handing off the biggest Problem – the university entrance examination

However, the reform of the national unified university entrance examination remains a problem unsolved. This is the most important, high-stake and competitive public examination in China. It used to be very difficult and competitive and pushed most of the schools to spend up to one year in drilling students with the exam type items. It affected school teaching and learning as well as assessment in all levels and all aspects (Gao, 2003). The MOE policy of this reform is:

“The university entrance examination and admission system should reform to keep pace with the school curriculum reform. It should follow the principle that this examination must be advantageous to the selection of university candidates, to the implementation of quality orientated education and, to the right of universities in making decision independently. The contents of examination should weight on assessing the ability and quality of students, and reconstruct a new system including qualitative evaluation. Students could have more than one chance to take the examination in this new system and, both universities and students could have their choice.” (MOE, 2001; Guideline no. 15)

The MOE made the decision that the national unified examination was going to become a provincial public examination. Each province department of education must develop its own strategies and approaches for this examination. Thus the MOE ‘passed the ball’ to the local educational authorities who have yet to really solve the problem.

Policy strategies at the local level

To better understand how the assessment policy works in China one needs to look at how it is played out at a local rather than at the national level. The following discussion will include a review of Guangzhou, a city in Guangdong Province, where officials are attempting to implement the policies called for at the national level.

Guangdong Provincial strategies

Considering that there are great differences between different cities of Guangdong in economic and educational development, the provincial department produced only the rules of public examinations and left others, including the interpretation of the central policy and strategies for school based tests to the city authority.

The senior secondary school certificate examination was cancelled. The senior secondary school entrance examination was combined with the junior secondary graduation examination and organized by the city bureau of education under the MOE policy. Students’ performances on this examination were rated in a five-point scale. A student’s final grade was to consist of two parts: 90 percent of the contribution came from the examination and 10 percent came from the result of assessment in general qualities of learning. All public examinations were closed book tests except the oral examination in a foreign language.

However, there was trouble in proposing the scheme of reform in university entrance examination. Since there are millions of examinees (7.23 million in China and 0.53 million in Guangdong in 2004[3]), this examination becomes important and attracts attention from the whole of the Chinese society. People in China believed that the present closed book pen-and-paper test format was an effective and reliable method of selection and, more importantly, it was a good method for maintaining social fairness and avoiding corruption. This made local government officers become very conservative in dealing with this issue since they worried that any improper change in university entrance examination might cause social turbulence. In addition, the local officers who used to keep up with the top education officers for their own security, under the tradition of a very centralized society, still wished to follow the central policy or at least get some advice and support from the Centre. However, the active agent in the central government, the National Education Examinations Authority, seemed not to be so enthusiastic in the curriculum reform and its related assessment reform. It was relatively silent. By now, almost all the policy was coming from another agent – the National Centre for School Curriculum and Textbook Development and its associated agents. However, this agency was not responsible for the reform of university entrance examination and as a result, officers in provincial centres of educational examination seemed to loose their direction. All four experimental provinces (including Guangdong) in senior secondary curriculum reform had not yet presented their schemes of the reform in university entrance examination, though they were expected to have been published before September, 2004.

Policy proposals and Decisions of Guangzhou CBOE[4]

Assessment reform in Guangzhou is rooted in two lines from the central government in Beijing. One is the National Centre for School Curriculum and Textbook Development and its associated agents. They are active in developing policies for the reform of within-school assessments and public examinations during that stage of schooling. They have attempted to change school assessment to a learning facilitating and student friendly approach with diversity, process-focused and school based direction. Another line starts from the National Education Examination Authority. Only a faint image of the reform of university entrance examination has been presented since then. Under these circumstances, assessment reform in Guangzhou referred only to within-school assessments and the senior secondary entrance examinations and carefully kept balance between these two lines.

The Guangzhou city bureaus of education (CBOE) decided to construct a “network of school assessment and quality control”. It was declared that this network aimed at: a) implementing the new national curriculum and achieving the national standards; b) improving the quality of basic education; c) improving the efficiency of school management; and d) promoting further reform in student assessment (GZRSIL[5], 2003).

In the Scheme of School Assessment and Quality Control, the city bureau defined that “all assessments that routinely happened within school are developmental evaluation[6]”, and “variety of evaluation techniques including pen-and-paper tests, tests on experimental skills or computer operational skills, oral exam, reports, classroom observations, descriptions of learning process, interviews, analysis of student homework, performance in learning tasks, learning portfolio, etc. were encouraged” under this concept (GZRSIL, 2003, p.2). This interpretation might lead to misunderstanding and confusion in practice as will be discussed later.

Following the central policies, the CBOE of Guangzhou decided (GZRSIL, 2003):

a) Rating grades will be used in all within-school tests in primary and junior level.

b) Assessment of students’ “general quality in learning” needed to be recorded at the end of each term.

c) All schools needed to apply the processing and qualitative evaluation techniques in their within school assessment.

d) All techniques which might lead to the improvement of pen-and-paper tests were encouraged. Those included the use of open-ended items and open-book tests.

The CBOE of Guangzhou also emphasised the importance of external examinations. Even though the central policy was that all within school tests should be developed in schools, it was decided that “both schools and the district office of education could be the subject body of the mid-term and term tests” (GZRSIL, 2003, p.2). This actually encouraged or required all the district offices of education in Guangzhou to organise or be involved in the external mid-term and term tests. Besides that, external sampling tests were organised for each subject at every stage of schooling. This meant that students need to take external sampling tests every three year (primary year 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and junior secondary) in all subjects. This examination was to be conducted at school, district and city level. All the districts and schools were required to report the pattern of student distribution according to their marks in this examination.

A list of important teaching objectives and content were also included in the Scheme of School Assessment and Quality Control which described the emphasis that Guangzhou CBOE placed on national curriculum standards and student assessment.

Discussion

Assessment reform in Guangzhou had its origins in China’s national curriculum reform that was responding to the challenges facing China in the twenty-first century. It was also a result of serious criticisms that started from mid 1990s of education assessment which was in turn identified as a huge obstacle in the path of education reform. Education reform aimed to lead to a more quality and developmental orientation.

The reform promoted a process of conceptual change in student assessment for teachers in Guangzhou. “Developmental assessment” became a new but confusing concept for teachers and educators. As in the definition of GZRSIL, it lead to a misunderstanding that all evaluations routinely happened in schools could automatically facilitate student learning if a variety of evaluating techniques were applied. With this misunderstanding, and with the belief of most teachers that only pen-and-paper tests were reliable (Gao & Huang, 2004), many schools did not want to decrease the frequency of pen-and-paper tests, but added in more assessments using different techniques. This leads to heavier teacher workload and student pressure. However, discussions on issues such as defining the nature and roles of student assessment, how the process of learning could be evaluated, etc., were widespread throughout China. These discussions could have re-conceptualized the teachers’ ideas of student assessment in a more learning-facilitating direction. Such discussions might also have affected people’s beliefs, especially parents’, beliefs about quality teaching and learning and could have lead to a better environment for student learning and assessment.

Another change related to the introduction of process and qualitative assessment techniques. However, since these concepts and associated techniques were imported from other countries, their appropriate implementation became a problem for all teachers. For example, the class size of primary and junior secondary schools in Guangzhou is about 50-60, communication between teachers and students using portfolio assessment became difficult even though this was quite an important feature of using portfolio assessment. Therefore a number of pioneer teachers started to develop alternative approaches for portfolio.

The biggest change in school practice might be the introduction of assessment of students’ “general quality in learning” and the use of rating grade in tests and examinations. The former extended the scope of students, teachers and especially parents to report and record students’ all-round development. Student self-evaluation and peer-evaluation techniques were widely used in this field, which encouraged students to review and learn from their own experiences of learning. This made it difficult to rank students thereby creating a less competitive learning environment for students.

More teachers were involved in improving test-item design techniques because it was still true that pen-and-paper tests were still the most important technique in assessment in most schools. Teachers were interested in developing open-ended items and the related marking scales. The SOLO[7] taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) was introduced to build the rating scale in science. Another technique named PTA[8] was introduced in marking essays in Chinese and social studies.

However, under the very strong tradition, external examinations were still in people’s mind a fair, reliable and valid approach to assessment. This was especially true given that the reform policy of university entrance examination was still vague and most were waiting for clarification of new policies, trying to keep balance between the tradition and the new orientation, and move forward slowly and safely. … All these factors had to be the considered by teachers and educators but tended to cause conflicts and confusion in their minds. In practice, there was an effort not to reduce the frequency of tests and examinations but to add new assessments. This increased teachers’ workload and students’ pressure which in turn lead to their aversion and rejection of the overall reform.

Conclusion

While the largest education system in the world was moving in the direction to reform the assessment system it appeared that they had taken the advice offered by Fullen (1991) to look at the organization “to continue to learn as much as you can to be an agent for societal improvement”. They are attempting to use educational assessment to determine how well students learn as well as a means of monitoring the quest for improved education. They were using the research on the advances in cognitive and measurement science to rethink fundamental scientific principles and philosophical assumptions, which had served as the foundations for approaches to assessment for centuries. They may have understood that assessment is a more complex process than examinations—however the policy had difficulty being implemented because there were inadequate attempts to overcome the biggest barrier of public opinion.

As a response to external challenges, a rational planning approach to change initiative through such things as need analysis, research and development, strategy formation, resource support, implementation and dissemination, and evaluation (Lueddeke, 1999) has been considered in many schools. Such a systemic approach is helpful to decision makers in identifying actual concerns and engaging teachers and stakeholders in implementing change through innovative pedagogical practices. However school change is complex and chaotic (Fullan, 1993), it “will always fail until we find some way of developing infrastructures and processes that engage teachers in developing new understanding, deep meaning about new approaches of teaching and learning” (Fullan, 2001: p. 37). Apart from systemic planning, there are a number of crucial factors, such as school vision, visionary leader, school strategy, and government policy support which together with the innovative change, drive school change and help to bridge external challenges and school practices.

Counties internationally are working to make education assessment less technical and more educational. China, like many countries are trying to use a more qualitative approach to assessment, however, due to the complexity of the assessment as an educational issue, concepts and strategies of the Chinese educational policy makers at both central and local seems to be confused and conflict. However, it is clear that the implementation of this type of assessment is now a critical education policy though there are still many obstacles needed to overcome. Hopefully educators and teachers in China understand the complexity and difficulty of this reform so they will go ahead slowly and try to keep balance among many factors that affect the assessment system. Assessment change will enhance education and assessment for 180 million students in China as deep changes can result from policy makers adapting a strategy of educational assessment reform.. Following Fullen (2001) they will need to have an approach that allows the change for assessment and curriculum to be systemic in regard to policy implementation.

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Figures

Figure 1 Policy process in China

Figure 2 Acting agents of curriculum and assessment reform

Figure 3  Structure of the senior secondary curriculum