Macao Pui Ching Middle School, Macau, China

Abstract: The reform of diversified assessment in basic education in Macau continues to advance, completely breaking away from the traditional single-score evaluation mechanism. Yet current educational measurement in Macau’s senior high school mathematics still exhibits the structural contradictions of “unified assessment standards failing to accommodate diverse learning profiles, static evaluation failing to cover dynamic abilities, and outcome-based judgement replacing differential diagnosis.” Senior high school students in Macau follow diverse pathways for further study, and the stratification of their academic foundations is marked; a homogenised educational measurement model cannot identify individual learning differences among students, nor can it achieve the precise compensation of weaker learning conditions or the cultivation and empowerment of strengths-based literacy, with the result that the implementation of the diversified assessment policy remains merely formal.To address the core pain point of the “lack of standardisation but insufficient personalisation” in senior high school mathematics assessment in Macau, this study takes as its starting point the differential measurement theory of educational measurement, and, in light of Macau’s Framework Law for the Non-tertiary Education System and the academic achievement assessment requirements for senior high school mathematics, innovatively proposes a “differentiated-learning-profile-compensation” educational measurement model. It constructs an entirely new assessment system of “differential diagnosis – tiered scoring – dynamic tracking – targeted compensation.” Unlike research on traditional process-based assessment, this study focuses on the differential-adaptation function of measurement: it formulates personalised measurement yardsticks based on each student’s individual learning-profile baseline, achieving the precise measurement effect of “the same test paper with different benchmarks, the same loss of marks with different attributions, and the same score receiving different evaluations.”

A comparative empirical study of parallel Grade 10 classes in Macau shows that this measurement model can effectively enhance the precision of learning-profile diagnosis, narrow the academic-ability gap among students at different tiers, and optimise the implementation of teaching according to students’ individual aptitudes, providing an entirely new localised practical pathway for the reform of personalised educational measurement in senior high school mathematics in Macau.

Keywords: Macau senior high school mathematics; educational measurement; learning-profile differences; diversified assessment; differential compensation; personalised assessment