Research On Carrying Out Performance Assessment In Explorative Study

Explorative study refers to a kind of study method and study processin teaching, in which we create an analogous academic (or scientific)research situation, and decide on a research task in a certain subject or inactual life. Students can acquire development in knowledge and skills,emotions and attitudes, and especially in explorative spirits and innovationabilities through such explorative activities as independently discoveringquestions, experimentation, manipulation investigation, gathering anddisposing information and expression and communication. Compared withreceptive study, explorative study is more characteristic of questions,practicality participation and openness, and is contributive to the overalldevelopment of students;comprehensive abilities, and therefore drawsmore attention from the educational field in our country. With the rapid development of theoretical research on educationalevaluation in China in the middle and late 1980s, there appeared a series ofnew evaluation methods, among which is performance assessment.Performance assessment is an all---scale evaluation method to evaluatestudents' participation awareness, cooperative spirits, experimental skills,explorative abilities and application standards shown in the course offinishing a series of tasks (e.g. experimentation, debating, investigation anddesigning ) by observing, recording and analyzing students' performancein all study activities. Quantities of practice have proven that implementingperformance assessment in explorative study can effectively meet theevaluation requirement of emphatically testing students' actual activityperformance in explorative study, contribute to teachers' knowing students:experience and feelings got in participating in explorative activities, andhelp students to know themselves better and pursuit better development.Thereby, I believe that carrying out activity performance evaluation inexplorative study is of great practical value. Starting with researching into the theoretical basis of implementingperformance assessment in explorative study, this thesis states thesignificances and functions of implementing performance assessment inexplorative study and designs the following concrete processes ofperformance assessment in chemistry explorative study activities: 1.making clear assessment purposes;2.selecting the tasks of assessmentstudy;3.determining assessment contents;4.making assessment criterions;5.designing assessment tools and carrying out teaching practice.In order to test the effects of implementing performance assessment inchemistry explorative study, I chose one class for experiment using the newsenior chemistry textbooks. I adopted traditional teaching methods in thefirst term and carried out performance assessment in explorative study inthe second term. Then, I made assessments on the teaching effects throughobservation and questionnaires. By comparing the study performances ofthe two terms, I have found that the students show changes in three aspects:The first is that their interest in chemistry is increasing;the second isthat the class atmosphere becomes more active, with more exchangeactivities and stronger desires for exploration from the students;the third isthat students become better at reflecting on and evaluating the studyprocesses of themselves or their partners after class. The results of theexperiment have proven that carrying out performance assessment inchemistry explorative study can effectively arouse the study interest ofstudents, cultivate students' comprehensive abilities of analyzing andsolving problems, of cooperative spirits and of exploration and thereforepromote the development of students' comprehensive qualities.