When it comes to evaluating students based on curricula in Korea, the focus has mostly been on written assessments. However, regarding this evaluation method , academics have continuously criticized it as testing one’s rote memorization and instea...
When it comes to evaluating students based on curricula in Korea, the focus has mostly been on written assessments. However, regarding this evaluation method , academics have continuously criticized it as testing one’s rote memorization and instead, have emphasized on the implementation of performance assessment as an alternative.
Performance assessment was introduced starting in 1999 with the aim of evaluating the overall developmental process of students. As an alternative to written exams or assessments, performance assessment evaluates one’s learning process as a way to gauge a student’s knowledge, behavior and participation skills in class.
The purpose of performance assessment is focused on developing critical thinking skills, creativity and problem-solving ability. These assess students’ developmental process or outcomes based on how they act in specific situations. In addition, performance assessment goes a step beyond learning outcomes or achievement-oriented assessments. Rather, it emphasizes teacher-student and student-student relationships.
The performance assessment is an effective evaluation method as a means to continuously observe and grasps the language- learning process. This is because it comprehensively assesses and synthesizes student-teacher and student-student interactions, educational content, and how that content is delivered and applied.
To reflects this, since performance assessments began, their importance have been increasingly emphasized whenever curricula are revised. The usage of written assessment is decreasing compared to that of performance assessment and the evaluation methods are becoming more varied.
The key objective of the revised 2015 curriculum of the second foreign language course is as follows. First, it is to develop communication skills using foreign languages. Second, it is to cultivate information-processing ability to utilize various information in foreign languages through understanding foreign cultures. To this end, the revised 2015 curriculum requires class participation of student in assessment area and student-centered assessment and longs for various assessment methods taking advantage of performance assessment. However, even now Chinese education often evaluates knowledge through simple memorization of reading & speaking and conducted as a formal performance assessment in current school.
Therefore, this study considered that items for performance assessment are needed in order to supplement the problem of simple memorization knowledge assessment and to serve as a facilitator to aggressively take participation in the class for Chinese learning. Therefore, this study targeted to develop items for performance assessment to evaluate students' various abilities.
In order to achieve the purpose of the study, first of all, I analyzed the types and methods of performance assessment which were implemented at Seoul Middle School for the past 5 years. Based on the analyzed contents, I studied cases with new items for performance assessment meeting an educational goal of revised curriculum of 2015 for Chinese goal and assesment direction. And then I tried to present items for performance assessment in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture as the main content of the 9 Chinese textbooks in the middle school.
Focusing on the composition and content of 9 Chinese textbooks in middle school, the method, criteria and objectives of performance assessment are composed similar to assessment plan of teachers. For sure there is a general lack of research on Chinese and performance assessment in the middle school and assessment methods and items presented in this study may not be complete. I hope that this study will trigger an in-depth study of performance assessment for Chinese. In addition, it is expected that it can contribute in order to solving the difficulties and problems of performance assessment and to develop various new assesment items and methods.