Citizenship Education, Globalising Trend and the Student Assessment Reform :
A Case Study in China
Xu changqing*
(School of Education, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou,510275,China,
Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 52900, Israel)
Abstract: Citizenship education is the preparation of individuals to participate as active
and responsible citizens in a democracy. Facing to the globalizing trend ,many contries pay
much more to the students‟ citizenship education. How to assess the level of a country‟s
citizenship education level? The way of assessing the students‟ achievements is a very
importment factor. Assessment of student achievement is an important part of the teaching
and learning process. Given at the beginning of a course, assessments help you know where
to begin and/or identify areas of remediation that must be addressed. Frequent assessments
during the course help you and your students see the progress of learning and help identify
problematic areas where students need more help or time. Given at the completion of
instruction, assessments tell you how much has been learned by the end of a unit, by
mid-semester, or by the end of the term. They provide the basis for making judgments on
the grades to assign each student. But facing to assess in the practice, the problem is the
standard which is to be used, with a focus on tests or examinations typically, or the training
of the student‟s innovation and ability. With the advent of new technology and globalizing,
China is paying more attention to the train the students‟ ability and comprehensive quality.
The government including the central and the local has been carrying out measures to
change the old assessment into new one. This paper is divided into four parts: The first part
is the introduction. The main idea is providing the macro context under which assessment
policy is being developed in China. The second part concerned about “the student
assessment reform: the central government”. The main idea is introduced the measurements
in China: Carry Quality-oriented Education Assessment, Test and Examination Reform
Efforts,Stop Ranking: Rate, Reform the university entrance examination. The last part is
the discussion and conclusion. Counties internationally are working to make education
assessment less technical and more educational. China, like many other countries are trying
to use a more qualitative approach to assessment to build up sound citizenships for the
country.
Key Words: Citizenship Education Globalising Trend Student assessment China Reform
Xu changing: Ph. D of education. Lecturer of the department of Education, Sun Yat-sen
University, China. Now is a post-Doc researcher majored in economics of education,
working in Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan,Israel(52900).
Email:changqingxu888@163.com/c.tsungxu@yahoo.com
*
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1.Introduction
Citizenship education is the preparation of individuals to participate as active and
responsible citizens in a democracy. Facing to the globalizing trend ,many contries pay
much more to the students‟ citizenship education. How to assess the level of a country‟s
citizenship education level? The way of assessing the students‟ achievements is a very
importment factor.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 statistics from the MOE official website may be manifested this
problem.In 2003,there are total number of kindergarten students is 20,040,000, primary
school students is 116,897,400, the junior secondary schol students is 66,908,300,the senior
secondary school students is 32,434,000, the tertiary institution students is 11,085,600.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 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.
Assessment of student achievement is an important part of the teaching and learning
process. Given at the beginning of a course, assessments help you know where to begin
and/or identify areas of remediation that must be addressed. Frequent assessments during
the course help you and your students see the progress of learning and help identify
problematic areas where students need more help or time. Given at the completion of
instruction, assessments tell you how much has been learned by the end of a unit, by
mid-semester, or by the end of the term. They provide the basis for making judgments on
the grades to assign each student. But facing to assess in the practice, the problem is the
standard which is to be used, with a focus on tests or examinations typically, or the training
of the student‟s innovation and ability. With the advent of new technology and globalizing,
China is paying more attention to the train the students‟ ability and comprehensive quality.
The government including the central and the local has been carrying out measures to
change the old assessment into new one.
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;
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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. 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.
2.Reforms to the traditional Education
The central government reform to the student assessment in middle schools and
primary schools.Control over the content of schooling is usually one of the last areas that
central authorities are willing to decentralize. This is as true for centralized, democratic
states such as Japan, as it is for centralized, Leninist states such as China. The central
educational authorities in China keep close watch on school leaving qualifications,
textbooks, and curriculum and while there is some tolerance for diversity it is quite limited
(Bray, 1999). Much more leeway is allowed in higher education (Mok and Wat, 1998;
Hawkins, 1999). Within the nine-year compulsory cycle the SEC maintains central control
in core subject areas and areas where they have a particular interest (such as moral-political
education) (Hawkins et al., 1999). A statewide curriculum framework was drafted in 1992
and implemented in 1993. Most courses are compulsory with some options at the junior
secondary level. While this effort was principally carried out by central authorities certain
components were developed jointly between central and local authorities under the policy
that “local authorities will also undertake some responsibility” for curriculum development
(State Education Commission, 1994).In the process of citizenship education, parents,
religious organizations, community organizations, and others too are all 'carriers' of
citizenship (Torney-Purta et al). Moreover, withthe advent of service learning, there seems
to be an acknowledgement that schools cannot doeverything and be solely responsible for
citizenship education. In that light, additional questionsmay be raised: What part of
citizenship education do schools do best? What do the other playersdo best? I think all of
them do best. More over, the Curriculum must fit into the Citizenship education.Chinese
government make measures as follows.
Carry Quality-oriented Education Assessment
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 moral performance, civil awareness, learning aptitude, ability in communication and
cooperation, physical wellbeing, aesthetic literacy and so on. 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: knowledge and skills, methods and process,
emotion, attitude and value. The MOE adopted a flexible stance and encouraged schools to
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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.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. Education (experimental draft) and the National
Curriculum Standards for General Senior Secondary Schools (experimental draft), which
were published in 2002 and 2003 respectively.
Further research on outcomes would be beneficial, including controlled comparisons
between results achieved with students in the reforms and traditional classrooms, the initial
findings of this study suggest several positive outcomes.Students in the revised courses
engaged in learning that was more interactive and moreclosely aligned with real-world
challenges and social needs. This provided enhanced opportunity for students to develop
broad language skills, and to apply these skills using new technologies in communication,
research, analysis, and production of newknowledge.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. 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
For many centuries, the Chinese have viewed their country's examination system,
which dates back to the Shui dynasty in 603 CE, as the main route out of poverty for a child
from a low-income family. However, like Singapore and Japan, China is attempting to
reduce its reliance on rote learning. Realizing that examinations inevitably drive classroom
practice, China has revised its highly competitive university entrance exams by requiring
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students to integrate knowledge from a wide range of fields. For example, a recent exam
question on the increased number of private cars in China required students to draw on the
diverse fields of statistics, comparative analysis, supply and production, urban traffic,
pollution, and social studies. China's reforms in classroom and examination practices have
occurred in an exceptionally short period of time. China's practice of building on traditional
culture—or “holding new wine with the old bottle” (Cheng, 2004, p. 16)—appears to have
contributed to its unusual success in implementing change. China's reforms, however, are
not without controversy. The new teaching approaches have not reached the majority of
schools in China's decentralized education system, with its increasing gaps in school
quality between the country's rich and poor areas. Some Chinese are concerned that if
examinations reduce their emphasis on memorization, children from poor families will be
at an even greater disadvantage than before because they will be tested on skills that their
schools have not taught them. Chinese students face a highly competitive and stressful
examination system. Yet China, like many other countries, has concluded that national
exams are the best way to ensure objectivity and avoid the favoritism that might occur if
the system permitted greater subjectivity in university admissions decisions.
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. 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.
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Evaluation needs to play its role in educating and facilitate students‟ development.” (MOE,
2001, Guide Line no.14)
Stop Ranking to the students
Carrying out students‟ achievement of “excellent, good, medium, pass and fail”
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.Meanwhile
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.
In a word, 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.
Reform 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.What decentralization has occurred has been in the context of a shift in focus for
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precollegiate education, away from the exam centered model, the 100 mark system of
grading and toward what has variously been described as “quality education”.
Discussion and Conclusion
What can be said about China‟s educational reforms and decentralization effects?
Have they been successful, unsuccessful? 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. 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.
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
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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.Earlier this month, China‟s Premier Wen
Jiabao unveiled a draft 10-year education reform blueprint, and welcomed public comments.
Tens of thousands of e-mails flooded in, recognition of the importance of education to
China‟s technological advancement, economic progress and global engagement. Now the
new education reform blueprint has alreay passed and direct the way of education
developnmet , and the citizenship education too.
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