An Evaluation Of Chinese Syllabus In Primary Schools

A syllabus is a course outline. In essence, a syllabus is a professional curriculum plan for one semester which is designed on the basis of subject curriculum standards, textbooks and the analysis of students by the teacher. Evaluating contributes to improvement. In order to implement the course more effectively and to achieve the established goals more efficiently, there is a need to evaluate the quality of a syllabus before implementation. Taking related studies in the field of curriculum design and program evaluation as the foundation, this paper tries to build an evaluation tool of a Chinese syllabus in compulsory education. With this evaluation tool as the analysis framework, taking 45 Chinese syllabuses in primary schools which use the textbooks from the People Educational Press as the evaluation sample, this evaluation found that less than half of the sample reached the qualified level:goal-setting payed attention to the unified standards of Chinese curriculum and ignored the specific studies of students, the alignment of sample syllabuses was not up to a high level, the way of syllabus presentation was normative, and the sample provided quite limited guidance for students, teachers and school administrators in implementation. In addition, the performance of "alignment" dimension is low:not only performances of the objectives, contents, implementation and evaluation but the degree of the alignment among them is low. The new curriculum reform advocates the concept of "student-based". On the contrary, this evaluation found that the sample ignored the student in terms of both goal-setting and text-rendering, and presented a strong sense of "teachers’ position". Integrated the above three points, the researcher has a view that the quality of current Chinese syllabus in primary schools is low.