Alignment between High School Biology Curriculum Standard and the standardised tests of four provinces in China

Abstract With the development and implementation of new curriculum standards, the field tests of education reform in senior high schools began in 2004 in four pilot provinces in mainland China. After five years of the reform, it is necessary to know how and to what extent the curriculum standard guides test classroom instruction. The present study was conducted with the aims of quantitatively exploring the alignments between the national High School Biology Curriculum Standard and the standards-based High School Exit Exam (HSEE) of 2009 in the four provinces, using Porter's alignment model. As a result, it was found that none of the four provinces' standardised tests of 2009 analysed were significantly aligned with the national Biology Curriculum Standard. The low alignment indexes are mainly because the four HSEEs analysed generally require lower levels of cognitive skills than that of the Standard. These results deserve universal attention by both policymakers and test developers in mainland China. Keywords: alignmentstandardstandardised testeducation reform Acknowledgements The two coders were Professor Enshan Liu and his master's student Qun Lu. This article is based on a presentation at a symposium at the NARST 2010 in Philadelphia, USA. The authors thank Jin Kang, a master's student in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning in BNU, and Huaru Wang, a doctoral student in the College of Life Sciences in BNU, for writing computer programs to work out the random sampling distribution. The authors also thank Professor Xiufeng Liu, from the State University of New York, and Dr Gavin W. Fulmer for being a further discussant and offering significant suggestions and help.