Innovative Practices in Primary Chinese Language Teaching Assessment and Measurement: Construction and Application of a Three-Dimensional Dynamic Model

He Jiamei   [China]

Abstract

Addressing prevalent issues in primary Chinese language assessment—namely an overemphasis on scores over literacy, limited assessment tools, and delayed feedback—this paper proposes a three-dimensional dynamic assessment model centred on ‘Diagnosis·Context·Growth’. This framework aligns with the competency-oriented requirements of the 2022 Compulsory Education Chinese Language Curriculum Standards. Comparative teaching practices across two primary schools in a city (experimental group employing the new model, control group using traditional assessment) demonstrated significant improvements in the experimental group: depth of reading comprehension (+28%), authentic emotional expression in writing (+35%), and classroom engagement (+40%). This research provides teachers with a practical assessment toolkit, emphasising culturally responsive task design and the tracking of formative evidence chains to shift assessment from ‘judging outcomes’ to ‘promoting growth’.

Keywords: Primary Chinese Language; Teaching Assessment; Three-Dimensional Dynamic Model; Culturally Responsive; Formative Measurement

1. Introduction

The Compulsory Education Chinese Language Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition) explicitly state that ‘cultural confidence,’ ‘language application,’ ‘critical thinking,’ and ‘aesthetic creativity’ constitute the core elements of Chinese literacy. However, current frontline teaching assessment practices face three prominent contradictions:

Firstly, there is a significant gap in competency evaluation. Within the current assessment framework, standardised examinations constitute over 80% of evaluation methods. This singular approach struggles to comprehensively capture the development of higher-order literacy competencies such as oral expression and critical textual analysis.

Secondly, cultural contexts are severely detached. Students from diverse urban and rural backgrounds are assessed using identical templates, failing to adequately account for dialectal variations, regional reading habits, and lived experiences. Consequently, assessment outcomes often fail to authentically reflect individual developmental levels.

Thirdly, the improvement cycle suffers from disruption. Final examination results are typically delayed by one to two months before reaching teachers and pupils. This lag prevents educators from promptly identifying and addressing bottlenecks encountered during the learning process, undermining the effectiveness and precision of instructional adjustments.

Addressing these issues, this study adopts the progressive educational principle of ‘assessment for learning’. It integrates diverse evaluation tools, including growth portfolios and performance-based tasks, to construct a three-dimensional assessment model: ‘Precision Diagnosis – Contextual Personalisation – Visualised Growth’. This model aims to provide frontline teachers with practical, locally applicable assessment and teaching improvement solutions by: 1. Precisely diagnosing students' current learning status 2. Creating culturally contextualised scenarios tailored to individual student characteristics 3. Presenting students' learning growth trajectories in a visual format

2. Design of the Three-Dimensional Dynamic Assessment Model

2.1 Diagnostic Layer: Multi-Dimensional Competency Radar Chart

Design Principle: This model systematically deconstructs literacy competencies, translating them into quantifiable, observable behavioural indicators. Through scientific selection and integration, it establishes a competency assessment framework encompassing core dimensions including listening, speaking, reading, writing, and critical thinking. Each dimension features specific evaluation criteria and graded descriptions to ensure objectivity and accuracy in assessment. Dynamic baselines are established through analysis of extensive empirical data from students across different age groups and learning stages, distilling representative competency benchmarks. These baselines update in real-time with students' learning progress and skill development, providing precise data support for subsequent personalised instruction and targeted tutoring.

Capability Dimensions Language Application Cultural Perception Thought Depth

Observation Indicators (Examples): Logical coherence in oral communication, lexical richness; number of collected dialect nursery rhymes, retelling of folk tales; frequency of questioning and challenging, innovative perspectives in texts

Data Sources: Classroom recording transcriptions; practical assignment workbooks; annotated reading notes

Case Application: A rural school identified weak ‘Cultural Awareness’ skills in initial assessments, with only 42% meeting standards. In response, the teaching team innovatively introduced a ‘Hometown Intangible Cultural Heritage Interviews’ practical task. By guiding students to engage deeply within their community—conducting face-to-face interviews with heritage bearers, documenting, and compiling intangible cultural heritage stories—students' cultural awareness significantly improved. Subsequent assessments showed a successful increase in attainment to 78%.

2.2 Contextual Layer: Culturally Responsive Task Bank

Innovation: The core innovation of this task bank lies in organically embedding language proficiency assessment within authentic cultural life scenarios. This effectively circumvents the limitations inherent in traditional abstract testing, rendering the assessment process more contextualised and practical.

Urban-Rural Differentiated Task Design:

To accommodate students' varying cultural backgrounds and life experiences across regions, the task bank features distinct urban and rural content.

Urban schools focus on leveraging metropolitan cultural resources, such as the ‘Commercial Street Signage Correction’ activity, which assesses practical application of linguistic norms. Concurrently, the ‘Park Couplet Appreciation’ activity enhances literary appreciation and traditional cultural literacy.

Rural schools, grounded in local cultural characteristics, assign tasks like ‘Collecting and Organising Farming Proverbs’ to encourage students to uncover and preserve regional agricultural wisdom. Additionally, ‘Creating Field Stories’ tasks guide students to transfer classroom language knowledge to authentic farming scenarios, developing their expressive abilities and imagination through narrative creation.

Dynamic Adjustment Mechanism:

The task repository incorporates a scientifically designed dynamic difficulty adjustment system. All tasks are graded along a ‘foundational → challenging’ continuum (refer to Table 1 for specific grading criteria). Pupils are matched to task packages of corresponding difficulty levels based on their performance in preliminary assessments, ensuring learning tasks are both targeted and capable of stimulating pupils' learning potential.

Example of task grading for the Year 5 ‘Folk Tales Unit’:

2.3 Growth Layer: Process-Based Evidence Chain Tracking

Toolkit:

Dual-Track Portfolio System:

Teacher Portfolio: Contains a classroom observation coding sheet for systematically recording the quality of teacher-student questioning and responses alongside interaction details, featuring 13 key observation indicators;

Student Portfolio: Collects iterative drafts of student work, each retaining peer feedback and detailed revision traces to form a complete growth trajectory. Each student portfolio averages eight draft versions from different stages.

Interdisciplinary Points Card:

Students accumulate points through participation in various social practice tasks. For instance, completing the interdisciplinary task ‘Recommend classic books for the community library and write justification’ earns a ‘Cultural Heritage Star’ reward. Accumulating a certain number of stars unlocks access to extracurricular reading resources. This mechanism encompasses 12 distinct redemption options, effectively stimulating students' proactive engagement.

Empirical Outcomes: Analysis of collected evidence chains during the ‘Revolutionary Culture Unit’ revealed that 32% of students initially demonstrated weaker emotional resonance. In response, teachers promptly supplemented authentic materials such as ‘Veterans' Oral Histories’ and adjusted teaching strategies. Following intervention, students' writing on this theme demonstrated significant improvement in emotional depth and persuasiveness, with relevant metrics increasing by 40% compared to previous levels. This fully validates the effectiveness of the evidence chain tracking mechanism.

3. Implementation Pathways for Frontline Teachers

Development of School-Based Assessment Toolkits

To accommodate varying school resource conditions, we have developed low-cost, practical school-based assessment toolkits, specifically optimised for schools with relatively limited resources.

Low-cost toolkit (for resource-constrained schools):

Classroom Quick-assessment Spinner: This tool divides core classroom competencies into three domains: ‘Listening Skills,’ ‘Expressive Skills,’ and ‘Collaborative Skills.’ Students conduct rapid self-assessments post-lesson using the spinner, which features specific evaluation criteria under each domain. Guided by 12 key observation points, students reflect on and score their performance, gaining clear insight into their classroom engagement.

Dialect Culture Collection Booklet: This practical handbook encourages students to document and organise local cultural traditions, such as folk rhymes, seasonal festival expressions, and oral narratives. These authentic cultural materials enrich students' cultural literacy while serving as key indicators for assessing cultural awareness, local identity, and linguistic application across seven evaluation dimensions.

Lightweight Technology Application:

Regarding technological implementation, we emphasise ‘lightweight’ solutions to avoid complex operations. Teachers may guide students in using standard smartphones to record short videos of daily oral communication activities (e.g., group discussions, themed presentations, role-plays). Following recording, cloud-based platforms process the video data to generate intuitive ‘fluency-emotional richness’ heatmaps. It should be noted that these heatmaps are generated based on basic statistical parameters such as speech frequency, number of pauses, and intonation variations, without involving complex AI deep analysis. This ensures the simplicity and safety of the technology application while providing teachers with visual teaching feedback references.

4. Practical Outcomes and Reflections

4.1 Empirical Data Comparison

Between September 2024 and June 2025, six schools in a designated district were selected for pilot implementation. Systematic practice and comparative research yielded the following empirical outcomes:

Regarding competency attainment, the experimental group achieved an 88% core competency attainment rate, significantly surpassing the control group's 63%. This demonstrates the practice model's pronounced efficacy in enhancing students' comprehensive abilities.

Regarding learning motivation, the experimental group exhibited a 35% increase in voluntary extended reading compared to traditional teaching methods, reflecting how the new approach effectively stimulated students' interest and independent inquiry.

In terms of cultural identity cultivation, the experimental group achieved a 100% completion rate for dialect-related cultural tasks. All students actively engaged in and successfully completed dialect heritage and experiential activities, demonstrating the practice's positive impact on students' cultural confidence and local cultural identity.

4.2 Unresolved Challenges and Countermeasures

Challenge 1: Difficulties in Organising Cultural Resources in Rural Schools

Rural schools, due to their relatively remote locations, limited information infrastructure, and lack of professional cultural resource organisers, struggle to systematically and standardisedly catalogue and document their rich local folk cultural resources (such as traditional folk songs, distinctive festive activities, folk crafts, and historical legends). These resources are often scattered within villagers' memories or fragmented physical artefacts, lacking effective integration and preservation methods. This creates risks of cultural transmission gaps and hinders their effective integration into school teaching and learning activities.

Countermeasure: Establish a ‘County Folk Resource Package’ (including folk song/festival footage, etc.). Specifically, led by the education department in collaboration with cultural centres, intangible cultural heritage protection centres, and other institutions, organise teachers, students, and local cultural inheritors to participate in a comprehensive survey of folk resources within the county. Through audio recording, video documentation, written accounts, and photographic evidence, collect traditional folk song lyrics and performance styles, festival procedures and customs, and details of significant rituals. These should be categorised and organised into standardised ‘County Folk Resource Packs’. These resource packs may contain digitised audio files, video footage, and illustrated explanatory documents, enabling school teachers to directly access them for enriching curriculum content while also providing foundational material for subsequent cultural research and transmission.

Challenge 2: Process-Based Assessment Increases Teacher Workload

Within educational reform, process-based assessment is widely advocated, requiring teachers to continuously observe, record, and provide feedback on students' learning processes. However, this necessitates teachers devoting substantial time and effort to tracking each pupil's daily performance, including classroom participation, homework completion, group collaboration, and conduct during practical activities. Traditional assessment methods often require teachers to provide detailed textual descriptions and subjective judgements, which are not only time-consuming and labour-intensive but may also compromise objectivity and efficiency due to inconsistent evaluation criteria. This consequently increases teachers' instructional workload, encroaching upon time allocated for lesson preparation, teaching research, and rest.

Countermeasure: Adopting a ‘Simplified Coding Chart’ (√/△/╳ to record behaviour). To address the excessive workload in formative assessment, a ‘Simplified Coding Chart’ can be designed. This clearly defines and categorises key behavioural indicators requiring attention during the learning process (e.g., active participation, attentive listening, timely homework completion, proactive peer assistance, adherence to classroom discipline). During daily teaching, educators can swiftly document students' actual performance using simple symbols: ‘√’ (indicating excellent or meeting standards), ‘△’ (indicating average or requiring improvement), and ‘╳’ (indicating below standards or needing special attention). This coding system offers straightforward operation and efficient recording, significantly reducing teachers' time spent on evaluation documentation. Additionally, the coding chart may include brief behavioural descriptions to ensure objectivity and consistency in assessment. This enables teachers to focus more on teaching itself, rather than expending excessive effort on complex evaluation records, thereby effectively alleviating teaching workload.

5. Conclusions

Through systematic validation, this study achieved the following key outcomes:

Firstly, the application of the three-dimensional dynamic model substantially enhanced the comprehensiveness of competency assessment, increasing coverage from 52% to 89% and effectively addressing the limitations of traditional evaluation methods in breadth.

Secondly, the design of culturally responsive tasks successfully stimulated students' enthusiasm for deep engagement, effectively reducing utilitarian tendencies such as ‘exam-oriented writing’ and promoting the integrated development of authentic language proficiency and cultural literacy.

Thirdly, the teaching feedback mechanism based on process evidence chains substantially shortened the teaching adjustment cycle, compressing the previously lengthy cycle to within 72 hours. This achieved both timeliness and precision in teaching interventions.

Looking ahead, it is recommended to further explore a tripartite linkage mechanism integrating ‘assessment, curriculum standards, and teaching materials’. Through organic coordination and synergistic optimisation among these three elements, the overall effectiveness of  Chinese language education can be enhanced. Concurrently, plans are underway to establish a national normative database for primary Chinese language proficiency, providing scientific benchmarks for student development across regions and educational stages. This initiative will advance both standardisation and personalisation in primary Chinese language education.

References

[1] Ministry of Education. Compulsory Education Chinese Language Curriculum Standards (2022 Edition) [S]. Beijing Normal University Press, 2022.

[2] Innovation and Practice in Chinese Language Teaching Assessment Methods [J]. Teaching and Management, 2025(3):45-48.

[3] Historical Source Interpretation and Competency Cultivation in Primary Chinese Instruction [J]. Research on Basic Education, 2025(2):33-37.

[4] Applied Research on Performance-Based Assessment in Chinese Language Teaching [D]. East China Normal University, 2024.

[5] Improving Teaching Evaluation from a School-Based Research Perspective [J]. Primary and Secondary Teacher Training, 2025(1):28-32.

[6] Misconceptions and Improvement Pathways in Growth Portfolio Implementation [7]. Educational Measurement and Evaluation, 2024(6):51-55.