Developing Diagnostic Assessment for the Needs of Learners: Bridging the National Standards and the Curriculum Requirements

The National English Curriculum Standards (NECS) for general high schools (2017) in China emphasizes the goal of developing the core competencies of students and meeting students’ needs of individual development. To achieve this goal, the NECS makes “embracing the competence-evaluation system with assessment of/for/as teaching/learning” one of its fundamental principles (MOEPRC, 2017; Mei, 2019). However, in practice, how to achieve this goal remains a major difficulty, due to the large class size, the inadequacy of teacher assessment literacy, and the teachers’ heavy workload. As a type of assessment for/as learning, diagnostic assessment is designed to help identify learners’ strengths and weaknesses and to give detailed feedback that can be acted upon, which leads to remediation in further instruction (Alderson, 2005). It could be a very useful tool to meet the needs of individual learners, especially in the context of high school education in China. This paper introduces the development, improvement and validation of a diagnostic English language assessment system for high-school English language teaching and learning in China. The assessment system, UDig, initially developed primarily according to NECS, is improved by the linking with China’s Standards of English Language Abilities (the CSE) (2018), which aims to refine the test with more measureable criteria, enhance the explanatory power of the test score, and enrich the feedback report with more information in finer grains. The validation study, mainly through action research in more than 70 schools, confirms the assessment system’s value in helping teachers and learners cope with the difficulties in implementing the curriculum requirements. The analysis of the case is aimed at demonstrating the value of diagnostic assessment in bridging the gap between the curriculum requirements and national standards of English.