How can education specialists scientifically evaluate schools, teachers, and students? On May 15th, the First (Chongqing) International Conference on Educational Evaluation kicked off at Liangjiang New Area. Education experts from home and abroad exchanged and discussed educational evaluation reform and innovation ideas in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.
Han Min, executive vice president of the Chinese Society of Educational Development Strategy, said that the overall plan for deepening the reform of educational evaluation in the new era emphasizes establishing an evaluation system with multiple participants. Future educational evaluation should form an evaluation system that combines government, school, and social organization evaluation. It is necessary to accelerate social organizations to participate in the assessment.
Huang Zheng, director of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission, believes that schools should establish a green educational evaluation system, including students' moral development, academic development, and innovative spirit.
The evaluation of teachers should take teachers' ethics as vital content and implement the negative list system for teachers' ethics assessment and the one vote veto system for teachers' moral misconduct.
Schools, society, and parents should abandon labeling students with scores and make evaluations more focused on individuals to help students achieve self-discovery and independent growth.
The future of education
Andreas Schleicher, director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Directorate for Education and Skills. (iChongqing file photo)
"The future education is not only about knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values, but also about the ability to mobilize one's own cognitive and socio-emotional resources," said Andreas Schleicher, director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Directorate for Education and Skills. The latest global assessment showed that social and emotional skills are essential for children’s future development and cognitive ability.
What exactly are social and emotional skills? The OECD defines it as the skills involved in achieving goals, cooperating with others, and managing emotions.
According to the OECD report, the development of global adolescents' social and emotional skills impacts academic performance, life satisfaction, psychological well-being, and test anxiety.
The survey results show that participating in extracurricular activities such as sports and art can help improve students' creativity and curiosity. In addition, students who identify themselves as highly creative also had higher levels of other social and emotional skills, such as greater empathy, perseverance, more potent energy, and more social skills.
"Social and emotional skills are not permanent. They can be shaped through learning," Andreas suggested that improving social and emotional skills should be regarded as a fundamental education project. Families, schools, and communities should jointly create a good environment conducive to developing children's social and emotional skills.
The creation of value
Liu Yunsheng, president of Chongqing Education Evaluation Institute, introduced the fifth generation of educational evaluation that Chongqing is exploring.
Liu believes that the previous fourth evaluation is the measurement of learning results, the description of the educational situation, the judgment of the social value of education, and the construction of the educational phenomena. The fifth generation of educational evaluation responds to the needs of social development and academic development and follows the logic of the evolution of educational evaluation. Its characteristics are human intelligence, machine intelligence, and human-machine collaborative intelligence.
"The fifth generation of educational evaluation should not only make a value judgment on educational phenomena but also promote value; even create value." Liu gave an example. "When a teacher evaluated students' extracurricular reading activities," he said, "you are great. It is a value judgment. You consciously read 'Water Margin' and grasped the characteristics of the characters in the promotion of value. It would be better if you could evaluate the characteristics of the characters! It is the creation of value."