The RCEF Blog 博客

This post was written by Xiaochun Li, a first grade teacher at Guan Ai Primary School. She is part of a team of teachers and RCEF staff who work on the library and reading program at the school. 以下的博客是关爱小学的李晓春老师写的。她是学校图书和阅读项目的一名负责人。 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [...]

This post was written by RCEF Monitoring and Evaluation Summer Intern Shang Xinyuan, a master’s student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Education. At the end of June before the government’s final exams, RCEF administered special tests aimed at evaluating students’ skills in critical thinking, communications, and creativity. To prepare for traditional tests, the [...]

In the previous post, I wrote about how RCEF designed special tests in Math, Science, English, Language Arts, and Social Studies for students. Our goal was to measure their skills beyond the textbook. Below are some examples of questions from the Social Studies test. What do you think is the most important of China’s ancient [...]

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 [...]

Ms. Wang is the first grade Chinese teacher. She likes to tell stories to students. Here is a blog post she wrote: Young faces, rising voices, enthusiastic hand movements. All of these show their happy and enriched childhoods, increased interest in reading, and improved speaking and presentation skills. A childhood without reading is a dry [...]

After hearing Ron Song say that he wanted to do an experiment that involved throwing eggs from the second story, I immediately envisioned a ground littered with yellow cracked eggs. More than a little suspicious about the idea, I asked, “You sure this will work?” To my surprise, he replied back confidently, “It’ll work.” And [...]

For the Guan Ai 4th graders’ lesson on masted ships, Teacher Sun decided that the best way to learn about how masted ships function, students should build their own boats and find a way to make them work. The 4th grade Chinese language text required students to know the vocabulary of a masted ship’s parts, [...]

If Guan Ai’s 4th Grade class is considered the smartest group of students at the school, then Teacher Sun, their language and science instructor, deserves immense credit for providing her students with a rich, engaging curriculum. Earlier this week I visited a language classroom of another teacher at another school. The lesson consisted of students [...]