Teachers’ Understandings and Actions towards China’s New Curriculum Reforms in the Context of Chinese Examination-Oriented Education
Open Access
- Author:
- Bai, Jinyan
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Leadership
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Roger C. Shouse, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Roger C. Shouse, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Nona A. Prestine, Committee Member
Deborah Schussler, Committee Member
Bernard Badiali, Outside Member - Keywords:
- educational policy implementation
educational reforms
curriculum and instruction development
high-stakes exam-oriented education - Abstract:
- China’s long tradition of exam-based education has tended to be a steadfast barrier to educational reform efforts. Over the past decade, however, new official school reform efforts have emerged under the descriptive banner of “quality education” or, in Mandarin, suzhi jiaoyu. In spite of serious efforts to change curriculum and pedagogy to support suzhi jiaoyu, studies indicate the tremendous power of social and organizational structures to restrict classroom change. These include not only the power of high stakes entrance exams (such as gao kao), but also the willingness and capacities of teachers. The conflict between suzhi jiaoyu reform and traditional structure fits well within the framework offered by Bolman and Deal, which includes structural, human resource, and symbolic lenses for understanding. Coupling this framework with a variety of qualitative research methods, this case study examines the beliefs and attitudes of a sample of 29 secondary school teachers in the Grace school in Sichuan as a means for understanding the challenges and meaning of suzhi jiaoyu school reform implementation. The empirical examination of the present study reveals that teachers’ reform implementation was reconfigured by their evolving perceptions and actions toward the reforms. As teachers developed stronger perceptions regarding reform practices’ merits, consistency, and technical properties and gained increasing self-efficacy in reform implementation, teachers’ reform behaviors increased. However, as the inconsistency between structural goals and reform practice appeared and the gap between teachers’ personal need and capacity and reform demand increased, teachers’ reform practice was negatively affected in classroom. This research illustrates implications for policy and contributions to theory and research, discusses limitations of the present study, and provides suggestions for further research.