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The Overall Plan for Deepening the Reform of Education Evaluation in the New Era puts forward different reform directions for each education stage and each education subject, and its core is "improving the outcome evaluation, strengthening the process evaluation, exploring the value-added evaluation and perfecting the comprehensive evaluation". At the same time, the "Program" once again emphasizes that efforts should be made to get rid of the stubborn disease of only grades, only entering higher schools, only diplomas, only papers and only hats, so as to establish a scientific and timely educational evaluation system and mechanism. To achieve the goal of reform, the education system needs to be upright and innovative, and it also needs systematic changes in society and culture.
The reform of educational evaluation needs to exert its strength in three aspects.
Whether it is admitted or not, educational evaluation has an important influence on educational practice and plays a baton role. Therefore, the reform of educational evaluation is particularly urgent, and it is the key to build a modern educational governance system and enhance the ability of educational governance. At present, everyone has a consensus on the outstanding problems in education evaluation, and they all support "breaking the five talents". The key now lies in "what to stand for" and "how to stand for it". This document only puts forward guiding principles, not an operable white paper. In the end, education authorities at all levels, schools, especially educators need to constantly explore and improve the evaluation system and methods in combination with their respective work practices. The author believes that the reform needs to be made from three aspects:
First, we should further clarify the value orientation of educational evaluation.Value orientation is the coordinate origin of the evaluation system, and the evaluation of behavior and results is based on value orientation. Theoretically, the value orientation of education in China has always been clear, that is, to train socialist builders and successors. Under the current international situation, the author thinks that "global competence" should be added to the requirements of talent training at the university level to cultivate socialist builders and successors with the mind and ability to promote the building of a community of human destiny and mutual learning of civilizations. Specific to educational practice, it is to answer what to train, how to train people and for whom. Since the goal and value orientation are clear, in reality, why is there a situation in which "five talents" prevail? Taking the evaluation of universities as an example, the organizational characteristics of universities are multi-mission, and bear the heavy responsibility of teaching, scientific research, social service and cultural inheritance. Objectively speaking, it is indeed difficult to respond to the demands of all parties and balance the allocation of resources to achieve multiple goals, and the current high competitive environment is also easy to induce universities to get quick success and instant benefit. Because of this, it is even more necessary for Do not forget your initiative mind to keep his mission in mind and always adhere to the fundamental task of cultivating people by virtue. The reform of educational evaluation is to take the performance of fundamental tasks as the core measure and promote educational institutions to truly educate people.
The second is to systematically reform the contents and methods of educational evaluation.The core task of educational evaluation reform is to solve the problems of what and how to evaluate. "Breaking Five Merits" means "Merit", not abolishing taking scores, papers, etc. as an indicator of personal and organizational evaluation. Taking student evaluation as an example, score is still the most efficient and comparable method to measure learning effectiveness, but it is not the only method or the best one. "Score" is a symbol of measuring learning effectiveness, not the whole of intellectual development, not to mention the all-round development level of morality, intelligence, physique, beauty and labor. Therefore, if we look at the "five virtues" in educational evaluation, the main manifestations are that the evaluation content is partial and the evaluation method is simple and rude. Therefore, the reform of educational evaluation should be systematically considered in the evaluation content, and diversified methods and tools should be adopted in the evaluation methods. The results obtained by different evaluation methods complement and confirm each other, so as to improve the scientificity of evaluation. The policy of "improving result evaluation, strengthening process evaluation, exploring value-added evaluation and improving comprehensive evaluation" provides a guiding principle for the systematic reform of education evaluation. Education authorities at all levels, schools and teachers need to deeply understand the spirit of the policy, start from these four aspects, combine work practice, conduct in-depth research and continuous exploration, creatively put forward educational evaluation methods suitable for their own work practice, and gradually form perfect rules and regulations and operational implementation rules.Or take student evaluation as an example. Besides grades, are there any other methods to evaluate learning achievements? Is there a tangible evaluation beyond summative evaluation? Is it necessary to inspect the learning process so as to adjust the teaching strategies in time? Do you teach students in accordance with their aptitude, taking into account the learning foundation and value-added? Are the students’ development goals systematic, detailed and observable, and are there various methods and tools that can fully reflect the development level?
Third, it is necessary to form a democratic education evaluation mechanism with the participation of multiple subjects.Education, especially at the level of higher education, involves many stakeholders, whose interests are not always in harmony. Therefore, it is necessary to form a multi-participation mechanism so that important stakeholders can reach a consensus on the standards, implementation methods and how to apply the results of education evaluation through games and consultations, so that education evaluation can play its due role. Furthermore, considering that the purpose of education evaluation is not only to provide the basis for selection and resource allocation, but also to find out the problems and deficiencies in the work through external evaluation and self-evaluation to achieve the purpose of improvement. In order to achieve the goal of improvement, the participation of multiple subjects is particularly important, and it is necessary to make goals and evaluations a consensus that everyone recognizes and is willing to work for. Taking teaching evaluation as an example, teachers are not only the objects to be evaluated, but also the participants in the formulation of evaluation standards, the important implementers and supervisors of evaluation, making teaching evaluation a way for teachers to understand teaching effectiveness and problems, and then improve teaching and quality.
Educational evaluation needs systematic reform of social evaluation.
"Li" needs the support of external systems. The education system is a subsystem of the social system. As a provider of public goods, the education system is highly dependent on the external environment, so the behavior of educational institutions is deeply influenced by the external environment. In order to implement the reform of educational evaluation, we must carry out systematic reform of social evaluation at the same time, otherwise it will be difficult to carry out the reform of educational evaluation. For example, if the personnel department still talks about rank and salary based on academic qualifications, how can the reform of educational evaluation break through these constraints? For example, in 2018, Shanghai reformed the settlement policy, stipulating that the fresh graduates of Peking University and Tsinghua can directly settle down without counting points, while Selected Graduates, the organization department of the provincial party committees, basically strictly limits them to 985 college graduates. Local governments still regard talents as their origins, so how can ordinary people be detached from what schools they attend? How can schools not pursue scores and enrollment rate, and how can they evaluate teachers’ process and value-added? Educational evaluation is a part of social evaluation, and the systematic reform of social evaluation is the prerequisite for the implementation of educational evaluation reform.
"Li" also needs to solve the problems caused by the lack of integrity and utilitarian culture. The lack of honesty is an important reason why many educational evaluation reforms cannot be implemented. Taking college enrollment as an example, it is obviously not reasonable to evaluate enrollment only by scores. In 2014, the college entrance examination reform was launched, and the most crucial one was to put forward the comprehensive evaluation of multiple admissions, that is, not only scores. However, in the subsequent implementation, it has become "two bases and one reference", and the score is still the core of admission. The reason for doing this is very simple. Once the score is not an important consideration, everyone is worried about endangering fairness and justice. In recent years, the Ministry of Education has strictly controlled all kinds of special enrollment. This year’s new strong foundation plan also clearly stated that the proportion of college entrance examination scores should not be less than 85%, with the aim of ensuring fairness. The lack of honesty makes the public, including educators, believe in rigid rulers more, which is one of the deep-seated reasons for the prevalence of "five virtues". Therefore, innovative measures need to be taken in the system design of educational evaluation to ensure fairness and justice.
Utilitarian culture is another important reason for distorting educational evaluation. The new college entrance examination reform emphasizes students’ right to choose. Finally, utilitarian calculation leads to a sharp decline in the number of physics candidates, and the third batch of eight provinces that initiated the college entrance examination reform have to take physics as a restricted subject. Desalinate the test scores, the school’s comprehensive evaluation, and look at the results of academic competitions, so the national Olympic Games; Seeing innovative activities, primary and secondary school students are engaged in scientific research, writing papers and applying for patents. Recently, a primary school student’s cancer research in Kunming was exposed to fraud, and the national student science and technology innovation competition was found to be riddled with fraudulent projects. Not only for the national college entrance examination, but also with the upsurge of studying abroad, a large number of "background enhancement" companies have been born, the core of which is to help applicants design various activities, even customize exhibitions and competitions, and help students who have spent a lot of money win in the comprehensive evaluation. Lack of honesty and utilitarian culture are often intertwined, which worsens the fair environment of education and endangers the credibility of educational evaluation.
The lack of honesty and utilitarian culture can not be solved in a short period of time. Therefore, any system design of educational evaluation needs to consider and guard against this, otherwise it will inevitably lead to new problems and lead to the evaluation reform giving up halfway.
In a word, the reform of educational evaluation is a complex systematic project, which needs to be "broken" but also "established". It needs the reform and innovation within the educational system, the systematic reform of social evaluation and the participation of the whole society, otherwise it will be difficult to achieve practical results. In addition, the reform of educational evaluation must keep the bottom line of fairness and justice, otherwise the people can’t agree.
(Author: Liu Ji ‘an, director of University Planning Office of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Chen Zhiwen, Secretary-General of Talent Branch of China Education Development Strategy Society, member of expert group of National Education Examination Steering Committee)