An Initial Probe Into The Evaluation Of Academic Achievement On Middle School Students

Basically, learning evaluation aims to diagnose to what degree students acquire knowledge and skills taught at school. However, more significantly, teachers should be able to promote students' learning by means of evaluation. The key to achieve this is to figure out through what to evaluate students' learning. Normally, the purpose of the standardized tests is to assess how well students grasp knowledge and skills. But it doesn't make it clear how about the process of learning itself. Moreover, it hampers students' learning in reality because of excessive utilization of standardized tests. Based on academic achievement, taking math subject for instance, this paper probes the issue of academic achievement evaluation on middle school students from theoretical and practical perspectives. In the theoretical part, two terms are defined on the basis of different views on academic achievement: academic achievement and math academic achievement. Furthermore, the paper explicates the necessity and significance of carrying out evaluation of academic achievement. As for the practical part, it includes three sections: the designing of the evaluation plan, the implementation of the evaluation plan and the re-evaluation of the evaluation plan. The designing section focuses on the determination of the criteria for the evaluation and puts forward a mode of academic achievement evaluation. This mode is composed of two dimensions. One is the sectional dimension, which involves knowledge, skills and affective factors; the other is the longitudinal dimension, which covers three types of academic achievement: fundamental academic achievement, developing academic achievement and creative academic achievement. In terms of the implementation of the evaluation, it concentrates on the process and analysis of data, which covers three types of analysis: the descriptive analysis of the overall result, the analysis of variation, and the analysis of the relevance of some variables. The first type of analysis analyses scores of students in different grades on the basis of variousitems of indexes in the testing part and the affective testing part. Also, it analyses the distribution of the student's total score, which is made up of the testing score and affective testing score. As for the second type, it attempts to analyze whether the affective elements of the academic achievement vary among different grades, among the key class and other parallel classes and among students of different sexes. The last type of analysis indicates the degree of relevance among the above-mentioned three types of academic achievement, and relevance between the affective and the testing part of academic achievement at the same grade of level. In the last section, with regard of re-evaluation of the evaluation plan, reflections are made on three aspects: the mode of evaluation, the determination of the criteria for the evaluation and the implementation of the evaluation, which may produce some insights for further research in future.