The RCEF Blog 博客

Historically, education in China has been very exam oriented. In the past, the main goal of many scholars was to pass the imperial exam, which would allow them to become civil servants. Nowadays, schools and teachers have their eyes on the university entrance exams （高考）. This focus on exams starts at first grade, or even kindergarten.

Here, most schools use the same strategy for exam preparation. They plough through the curriculum to leave as much time for exam preparation as possible. At the end, they usually have well over a month, which they spend doing dozens of practice exams which they buy from the many vendors who stop by every school to peddle their exam papers. The problem with this approach is that it gives students much less time during the semester to learn concepts and come to thoroughly understand them. At Guan Ai, in addition to encouraging teachers to take their time teaching concepts in the first place, we hold teacher meetings to discuss effective ways for preparing for exams. For example, finding common weak points and reteaching those concepts, reviewing concept-by-concept instead of just doing comprehensive practice tests, teaching students strategies for tackling specific types of questions etc.

Evaluating and tracking student progress is very important to our program. For most subjects, county-wide exams only reflect students’ most basic ability to recall facts, but not their understanding. In the science test, a lot of the questions are fill-in-the-blank questions taken straight from the textbook. Students could remember lines from the textbook, without having any idea what it means. For English, a paper-and-pencil test can show students’ reading and writing capabilities, but not their listening and speaking skills which are actually the emphasis of the curriculum at the primary level.

To fill this gap, we designed our own set of tests for each subject. In science and math, the tests asked students to apply their knowledge to solve real life problems. For English, every student had a one-on-one speaking and listening assessment. The Chinese test on spoken communication and essay writing. To test students’ spoken communication, we asked students to tell us what they would do if they were the principal of the school, and graded them based on aspects such as clear expression, giving reasons for their ideas, logical organization of thoughts and confidence. In social studies, we tested students on their ability to make judgments about social issues based on available information and their ability to support their arguments. This is the first time we’ve done our own comprehensive testing of the students and will serve as a baseline to measure students’ improvement over time. The next Guan Ai tests will take place right before the final exams. This time, we will also include assessment of skills in communication, collaboration and problem solving in addition to academic knowledge. Examples of test questions will be posted on this blog.