A Study On Performance Standards Based On Disciplinary Competence

Now we are in an unprecedented movement that pursues the quality of education. During this movement, as the symbol of academic achievement quality’s requirement, performance standards are the key for countries all over the world to monitor and assure a nation’s educational quality. However, performance standards have been absent in our country for a long time, which severely hinders the establishment of elementary education quality assurance system. Developing performance standards has significant theoretic and practical value.Under the background of "pursue fairness and improve quality" of our country’s educational reform, using historical approach, questionnaire survey and case study method, this study explores three fundamental questions, namely,"why does our country urgently need performance standards","what are performance standards based on disciplinary competence " and "how to develop performance standards based on disciplinary competence".Through the exploration of educational reform of countries and regions such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, German, Sweden, Finland, New South Wales, Taiwan and so on, the first chapter points out that performance standards play crucial role in today’s international educational reform based on standards. On the contrary, in our country the absence of performance standards causes the lost of education system’s development direction and hinders the deepening of elementary education reform.Through the exploration of performance standards’historic development, the second chapter clarifies that performance standards in the modern sense derive from disciplinary competence and are the representation of disciplinary competence. Meanwhile, the second chapter defines performance standards:curriculum and instruction oriented, pointing to the requirement of disciplinary competence, describing the degree and evidence to the content standards that students should grasp. The third chapter further explores the fundamental connotation of disciplinary competence. Based on the investigation of various countries educational standards and large scale international assessment program, it constructs a disciplinary model’s analytic framework which is made of disciplinary competence, disciplinary area, cognitive requirement, performance level and description, and problem situation And then it analyzes how to realize the transformation of disciplinary competence to performance standards through disciplinary competence model.In the fourth chapter, from perspectives of organization structure, development approach and development process, it explores and compares each country’s development procedure of performance standards. Then makes some rational thoughts about development procedure of performance standards in our country based on the international experiences and internal situation.When it comes to compile performance standards, it needs to make disciplinary competence concreted in basic constitutes of performance standards. The fifth chapter systematically discusses five essential technologies of that transformation that are clarifying the way which disciplinary competence transform to performance standards, choosing the presentation style of performance standards, drawing up performance level, writing performance level’s descriptors and determining performance samples.Combing above procedures and technologies, the sixth chapter develops a case of performance standards based on mathematical modeling competence, expecting to have a dialogue with practice, to illustrate the professionalism and complexity of the development of performance standards based on disciplinary competence, and to obtain valuable experience so as to provide a reference for developing performance standards in the future.