Construction of Curriculum Evaluation System for English Majors Courses under the Concept of Curriculum-Based Political and Virtuous Awareness ()
1. Introduction
In 2018, the Ministry of Education issued The National Standard for Teaching Quality of Undergraduate Majors in Colleges and Universities (Foreign Language and Literature), stressing that “foreign language majors should have a correct world outlook, outlook on life and values” (Higher Education Steering Committee of the Ministry of Education, 2018).
On May 28, 2020, the Ministry of Education issued The Guiding Outline for the Curriculum-Based Political and Virtuous Awareness (CPVA for short) in Colleges and Universities to comprehensively promote CPVA in colleges and universities. The outline emphasizes that “to comprehensively promote CPVA is to integrate the cultivation of values into the process of knowledge and ability training, and help students shape a correct world outlook, outlook on life and values, which is not only the essential meaning of talent training, but also the integrant part” (Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2020).
In the spring of 2020, the Teaching Guide for Undergraduate Foreign Language and Literature Majors in Colleges and Universities was launched. It points out that “Morality-strengthening Education” is the fundamental task of higher education. It should take the cultivation of high-quality foreign language professionals and compound foreign language talents with international vision, Chinese feelings and innovative spirit as the starting point and foothold of the construction of foreign language majors in colleges and universities (Director of Foreign Language and Literature Teaching of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education, 2020).
The three important government documents mentioned above emphasize the core position of value guidance in higher education, which could be achieved mainly by CPVA. CPVA refers to a comprehensive educational concept that takes “Morality-strengthening Education” as the fundamental task of education by making all other kinds of courses and ideological and political theory courses work together to form a synergistic effect.
Covering a large number of students in various majors, foreign language teaching (at present, college English teaching still holds the prevalent position compared with other foreign languages), in colleges and universities is featured with the following characteristics, namely, instrumentality, humanity and communication. Integrating CPVA into foreign language teaching organically will not only help to elevate students’ minds and morality, and foster their noble personality, but also highlight Chinese characteristics by means of cultural comparison between China and foreign countries. Cultural comparison will facilitate to cultivate students’ Chinese feelings, and create talents in the new era who can shoulder the great task of national rejuvenation. Foreign language teachers in colleges and universities across the country are trying to explore effective ways to combine professional education with CPVA, and strive to achieve the education goal of “knowledge, ability and competence, three in one”.
2. Literature Review
Limited to the academic papers published on CNKI, the research on CPVA education for foreign language majors can be roughly divided into the following three categories:
The first type is analysis of the objectives and connotation of CPVA education for foreign language majors. For example, Jiang and Li (2020) propose that under the goal of “Morality-strengthening Education”, foreign language education should take the cultivation of global governance talents as its new orientation. Shi and Wang (2020) believe that to improve the effect of CPVA, we should improve the connotation of virtue cultivation at the respect levels of disciplines, majors and courses. Liu and Yue (2020) propose that for college English teaching, the basic connotation of “Morality-strengthening Education” mainly includes three aspects: excellent Chinese traditional culture, world excellent culture, the spirit of the times and the belief of a community with a shared future for mankind.
The second is to explore the implementation path and teaching methods of CPVA in foreign language courses. Cheng (2020) points out that CPVA education in foreign language courses should realize the organic unity of knowledge system and value system through in-depth teaching. Wang & Shi (2021) suggest the promotion path of teaching reform from three dimensions: development model, curriculum field and participants. Huang and Chen (2021) elaborate the application of consistency construction principle for CPVA education in foreign language courses.
The third type is the specific case study of CPVA education for foreign language majors: Yang (2020) takes the teaching practice of CPVA education in the course of “Introduction to Contemporary Western Humanistic Spirit” of Nanjing University as an example to explore political and virtuous elements that should be considered in the curriculum construction for foreign language majors; Cheng (2020) demonstrates how to discover political and virtuous elements from the three perspectives of language, namely pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary; Wang (2021) elaborates the integration of CPVA into English writing teaching within the framework of Production-oriented Approach (POA).
The author takes “CPVA in foreign language courses” as the key word and finds that 404 academic articles are publicly available on the platform of CNKI (by the end of March 18th), including 46 articles in core journals. Most of the topics and contents of these articles belong to the three types mentioned above, and there are relatively few articles focusing on the evaluation of the CPVA teaching effect. Only one article published in core journal has been found by the time this paper is submitted, that is “Fuzzy AHP Assessment on Chinese-English Bilingual Short Vide—Assessment on the Learning Outcome of Curriculum-Based Political and Virtuous Awareness in the Course of English for Cultural Transmission” (Zhao, Wu, & Zhong, 2022). It is not difficult to see that in the process of theoretical interpretation and practical exploration of the integration of CPVA into foreign language teaching, there are relatively few research and achievements in its teaching effect evaluation. However, teaching evaluation is an indispensable part to test the achievement of teaching objectives. “A complete teaching design needs timely integrated evaluation feedback” (Hu, 2021: p. 58). Only by evaluating the effect of CPVA education in professional teaching, can it be better judged whether the teaching effect is satisfactory. Based on the evaluation, follow-up improvement measures and methods can be taken correspondingly, so that the integration of professional training and CPVA education can be achieved. In the next section, this paper discusses the problems of CPVA Education in Foreign Language Courses from the Perspective of Curriculum Evaluation.
3. The Problems of CPVA Education in Foreign Language Courses from the Perspective of Curriculum Evaluation
China’s higher education has been committed to the exploration of teaching quality evaluation, and it will take time to form a set of stable theoretical framework with universal guiding significance. Although the moral education of students has been taken as the top priority of higher education, proposed from the perspective of national education strategy in recent two years, CPVA is a new product and its concept as well as teaching mode need to meet the latest educational strategic deployment and requirements. Therefore, the research on the evaluation method of CPVA is a new topic in the field of teaching evaluation, and its measurement standard is more difficult to grasp accurately. It still needs time and energy for colleges and universities as well as superior educational departments to establish a scientific and effective quality evaluation system.
In order to investigate the status quo of CPVA evaluation in foreign language teaching from the micro perspective, the author designs a questionnaire on the current assessment methods and the integration of CPVA evaluation in Comprehensive English course. The reason why take Comprehensive English course for English majors as the investigation target is that this course is a professional basic course for English majors, covering the training of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating skills and the cultivation of students’ morality. Besides, English majors are the major part of foreign languages majors who are representative. The questionnaire is to investigate the following questions: 1) what are the current assessment methods employed in Comprehensive English course and to what extent political and virtuous elements are involved in the assessment methods. 2) who are the subjects in current assessment methods. 200 copies of questionnaire are distributed to English majors in five colleges and universities, including Baoding University and Hebei University, etc. and 189 valid questionnaires are collected. The statistical results are as follows:
Table 1 indicates that the traditional evaluation method still takes priority to the final examination. Teachers are used to evaluating students’ academic performance solely based on the final exam test result. Energy-saving and easily-scoring may be part of the reasons. Even if the formative assessment is adopted, the proportion of the final examination is still heavy, which leads to the neglect of the promotion of students’ learning enthusiasm and the formation of learning habits by the process assessment. Table 2 indicates that the examination content mainly focuses on the assessment of knowledge-based content, the assessment of CPVA education touches quite little. Table 3 shows that teacher of this course is still the major evaluation subject, while the other subjects of teaching and learning are neglected in the evaluation process.
Based on the data analysis, it can be found that the following two factors have caused the difficulties in integrating CPVA education into professional English
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Table 1. Current assessment methods of Comprehensive English course.
FTS = Final Test Score; UPS = Usual Performance Score.
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Table 2. Political and virtuous elements involvement in the assessment methods.
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Table 3. Subjects of teaching evaluation.
teaching. Firstly, the traditional teaching and evaluation methods hinder the progress of CPVA education into foreign language teaching. Under the pressure of exam-oriented teaching, some teachers still use the traditional teaching methods, such as monotonous lecturing and overemphasis of the importance of knowledge content, which push students to learn by rote and cram for exams with low consciousness and initiative of learning. As for the moral education teacher carry out in the class, students’ passive and negative attitude towards learning prevents the absorption of the virtue.
Secondly, the evaluation subject is generally the teacher himself with students, peers and political advisor excluded from the scope of the evaluation subjects which leads to the lack of objectivity and comprehensiveness of the evaluation, and also makes students lose the opportunity to improve their learning ability and political and virtuous literacy. In addition, as one of the evaluators of CPVA teaching effect, some foreign language teachers themselves have some problems in terms of ideological and theoretical level. Some teachers ignore the improvement of their own ideological and political theories and literacy. Knowledge-centered teaching mode and the lack of CPVA education deepen the students’ sense of indifference to political and virtuous consciousness, resulting in the failure of the organic integration of CPVA education into professional teaching.
Shi Jian asserts that “the difficulty of CPVA is to establish a complete curriculum evaluation system” (Shi & Wang, 2020: p. 44). To solve the above problems, this paper intends to take the Comprehensive English as an example to explore the construction of the multiple evaluation system of English major curriculum assessment. Hopefully, it will play a certain reference role for the teaching effect evaluation of CPVA in the professional curriculum.
4. Construction of Multi-Evaluation System with CPVA Involvement
As what is mentioned in the previous section, Comprehensive English aims to train students’ comprehensive English skills in terms of listening, reading, speaking, writing and translation. Covering from the first semester to the fourth one, this course occupies a large amount of time. The examination and evaluation of this course not only affect the learning effect of students, but also have a great impact on the cultivation of students’ learning interest, behavior habits and value orientation. Therefore, Comprehensive English should play an important role in the CPVA education for English undergraduate majors. The curriculum assessment adopts a multi-evaluation system rather than the previous assessment method which takes the final examination result as the only assessment standard. Featured with the diversification of subjects, multidimensional content and diversified methods, multi-evaluation system increases the proportion of formative evaluation, stresses students’ learning process, participation and attitude. The new evaluation system will facilitate the all-round development of students.
1) The Diversification of Subjects
The teacher of the professional course (the lecturer) plays the dominant role in the traditional evaluation. It is likely to lead to one-sided results if given personal feelings into account. Meanwhile teacher’s dominating judgment hiders the development of students’ initiative. Therefore, the author puts forward the diversification of evaluation subjects, which means adding other participants in teaching evaluation besides the teacher himself/herself. The evaluation subjects of Comprehensive English are the teacher, the student advisor (class teacher), the learning group members (peers), and the students themselves. Among them, the proportion of evaluation is the teacher for 70%, the student advisor for 20%, the learning group members for 5%, and the students themselves for 5% separately. The teacher evaluate students mainly from the perspective of learning performance and academic achievement, while other evaluation subjects focus on students’ political and virtuous performance from two dimensions: professional learning and daily life. Through the establishment of multiple evaluation subjects in forms of teacher-student evaluation, peer evaluation and student self-evaluation, dynamic evaluation files can be constructed. The evaluation indicators are refined from three aspects: language knowledge, pragmatic skills and CPVA education, so as to evaluate students in an all-round way. This method can effectively evaluate students in all directions and encourage them to improve their professional level and personal quality from daily life and learning.
It is worth stressing that the establishment of evaluation system not only aims at the evaluation of students’ political and virtuous performance of themselves and their classmates, but also should regularly evaluate the effect of teachers’ CPVA teaching, so as to promote the teachers to do teaching reflection and adjustment in time according to the evaluation feedback of students. Therefore, Teachers can gradually seek an effective way to organically integrate political and virtuous education into professional knowledge teaching, and promote the effect of CPVA education (Figure 1).
2) Multidimensional Content
With the reference to the evaluation system of CPVA proposed by Ni and Liu (2022), Comprehensive English designs an evaluation system of CPVA fits for the characteristics of English majors. In addition to the improvement of language knowledge and pragmatic skills, more attention should be paid to increase the evaluation dimensions of value & emotion, ability and behavior, so as to promote “language” and “morality” evaluation simultaneously. Besides formative assessment regarding students’ classroom performance and extracurricular performance, teachers can also understand students’ minds through observation, questionnaire survey, interview, theme discussion, case analysis and other forms according to the evaluation system, and give feedback, guidance and improvement in follow-up teaching. It is noteworthy that the evaluation system is not only for students, but also for teachers. Teachers are suggested to pay special attention to the Value & Emotion Effect of Figure 2 and strive to improve their personal political and virtuous consciousness. It should be clarified that CPVA education will not interfere with the teaching activities of professional courses or weaken the teaching effect. On the contrary, CPVA education can improve the ideological and humanistic nature of teaching, deepen the connotation of teaching and improve the efficiency of teaching. Only in this way can teachers really instruct and influence the students with their word and deed.
3) Diversified Methods
Diversified methods are employed in the whole process of teaching and learning. According to the above evaluation system from the four aspects, namely Knowledge Effect, Value & Emotional Effect, Ability Effect and Behavior Effect, the author designs more specific assessment quantitative indicators which
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Figure 1. Concentric circle diagram of evaluation subjects.
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Figure 2. Multi-evaluation system of CPVA teaching effect.
can facilitate teacher’s evaluation of students. From the five components of teaching and learning, namely, classroom performance, after-class performance, practice section, usual tests and final examination, the teacher can observe and record the performance of students in terms of CPVA, knowledge and ability, so as to realize comprehensive assessment and evaluation of students. In particular, the practice section is proposed to correspond to the Behavior Effect in the multi-evaluation system, including encouraging students to actively participate in various English related competitions at all levels at and out of school, such as speech contests, writing competitions and teacher skill competitions. By participating in different kinds of competitions, students have the opportunities to apply their knowledge into practical use, shifting the learning process from input to output. At the same time, students come to know the significance of perseverance, unity and cooperation while preparing for and taking part in the competitions. In addition, students’ sense of social responsibility and practical ability can be enhanced through participation in social practice, such as school history commentators and librarians. In addition to teachers’ evaluation, students are entitled to self-evaluation and mutual evaluation. Various methods can be used as self-evaluation tool to improve students’ cultural awareness, core literacy and self-study ability, such as reflection logs, etc. (Table 4).
5. Conclusion
Teaching evaluation is a crucial part in the process of professional teaching, indicating whether teachers have completed teaching tasks with high quality, and whether students have achieved learning objectives and gain academic
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Table 4. Quantitative indicators of assessment (for teachers).
achievement. Under the background that CPVA education is fully integrated into the teaching of various disciplines and majors, the CPVA teaching effect evaluation is an indispensable section in the teaching evaluation as a whole. The Outline clearly emphasizes that the effect of talent training is the primary standard for the evaluation of CPVA construction. The evaluation of CPVA should follow the path of “Evaluation-Reflection-Improvement” within a multiple evaluation system, emphasizing the diversification of subjects, multi-dimensional content and diversified methods. Students’ learning effect should be judged from both internalization effect and externalization benefit, which leads to teaching reflection and teaching improvement in terms of knowledge, skills as well as the CPVA. Only in this way can the educational goal of “Morality-strengthening Education” be achieved.
Acknowledgements
Sincere appreciation must be given to all the people who have given their support to the research, especially the participants of the survey. Special thanks are due to Baoding University with its generous support academically and financially.
This work was supported by Project: Hebei Higher Education Teaching Reform Research and Practice Project, 2020, Research on the Construction and Application of CPVA Resources in English Curriculum with the Theme of “General Secretary Xi’s Series of Replies to Young People” (No. 2020GJJG643).