The Design Of Performance Assessment And Action Research In Primary School English Teaching

Assessment drives course and teaching. What assessment is and how to assess determine where we will lead students to. Student assessment has been a hot topic in international education research field. Now our new course reform advocates that student assessment should not only focus on students' acquisition of knowledge and skills, but also pay attention to the development of students' various potential abilities and qualities. In primary English teaching, the present mainstream assessment system does not pay enough attention to students' other learning abilities, except their "double bases". The assessment adopted by teachers mainly focuses on the study while ignoring the positive effects of assessment on students' learning. Under this circumstance, "performance assessment", an effective improvement complementary to traditional assessment, has become a multi-dimensional and dynamic assessment system.Now in China, the research of performance assessment is still at the experimental and exploring stage, and its application at perceptual and random practice stage. Besides, no systematic theory is put forward. Therefore, this thesis aims at enriching the study on performance assessment both theoretically and practically as well as promoting the effective application of performance assessment in primary English teaching.This paper is composed of six parts. Chapter one is an introduction part, which mainly analyzes the present situation of primary English course assessment and what kind of assessment we students need. In this part, it contends that performance assessment should become an effective improvement complimentary to traditional assessment and pay attention to the improvement of students' comprehensive qualities. Chapter Two, which goes through related performance assessment theory, particularly introduces its definition, characteristics and the present research conducted at home and abroad, puts forward the significance of performance assessment research, namely its feasibility, meaning and creativity. Chapter three introduces the action research approach of performance assessment used in primary English teaching, clarifies the purposes and key points of this research, and particularly introduces the research design approach. Chapter four examines the specific steps in designing and developing performance assessment used in primary English teaching. Based on different methods of performance assessment design and development, this part introduces typical cases one by one and shows how the performance assessment is applied. Chapter five shows the practical effects of my research and my reflection on it. With the help of T-test and the data obtained from questionnaire, performance assessment's effects on students'English learning performance and the changes in students'acceptance degree, English learning interest and abilities after the experiment are analyzed respectively. Besides, this part comes up with the practical effects of my research, puts forward the assessment principle of placing students on the first place, and establishes a scientific and effective assessment model. Besides, this part has some reflection on this study's research design, the experimental reliability and validity and the popularizing of this experiment. In the last part of this thesis, I conclude that only the most suitable assessment model rather than the best one can be found. We should be fully aware of the limitation of the performance assessment and face it positively. With correct teaching ideas, we would, in the course of application of performance assessment, exploit its advantages and avoid its disadvantages, considering it as an effective one complimentary to traditional assessment models.This research can be used as reference for those primary English teachers to develop, design and apply performance assessment in their teaching.