Educational Assessment in Mathematics Teaching: Applied Research in China

Abstract

Fuxin, one of the cities in the west of the Liaoning Province, China, has a population of 700,000. It is a backward area in terms of economy and culture. For several reasons, education in Fuxin developed more slowly than in other cities, and the quality of the students and teachers was also less developed. According to a 1985 calculation, only 6.29 percent of all its junior school teachers had graduated from 4-year colleges, 33.72 percent from teachers normal schools, 46.25 percent from the former high schools, and 13.73 percent from the middle schools only. It is quite clear that most of the teachers do not have adequate amounts of formal schooling. On the basis of the standard of an Intelligence Quotient (IQ), the students here are below average. In 1986 in our research group, we examined the mathemat-ics marks of the students in Grade One, and to our great surprise, only 3 percent got 90–100 (marks), 14 percent got 70–89, 34 percent got 60–69, and others who got below 60 marks made up 49 percent. (It was a hundredmark system.) Most of the students’ marks were below the country’s average. For these reasons, our research group decided to start with the function of educational assessment in relation to middle school students (aged 13–15), to apply theory to practice, to improve the teaching process, and to do research on applied educational assessment.