Milestone 1

I was going to review the education system I experienced in terms of Pedagogy, because before I
studied the content of these 3 weeks, I thought that the biggest problem of the mainstream education
system and philosophy in China now comes from Assessment, but after I studied these 3 weeks, I
found that in fact, the educational mistakes presented in Pedagogy are as big.
If it is difficult to change the Curriculum which is influenced by the national policy, then it may be a
worthy direction to reform from Pedagogy.
However, since I spent a lot of time traveling this week, I decided to start from the easy part to me
and review the education system I have experienced in terms of Assessment.
★How Assessment is shaped by the different ecological layers of the biological model of human
development
If I try to summarize its ASSESSMENT in one sentence, it would be "test scores as the only
criterion", the tendencies and actions of each layers are as follows.：
LAYERS EXAMPLES How Are They Shaping/Being Shaped by The Assessment
Parents Only the score counts, they will be disappointed if their
children can’t get high scores, and then get anxious about
their future
Microsystem
School The main task is to train students to become question-solving
machines for College Entrance Examination, the final big
‘life-deciding’ test considered by the majority
PTA(Parents Most parents and teachers only see each other twice a
Teacher semester to discuss only grade changes, and rarely even
Association) bother to discuss the reasons behind the grade changes. If a
child's grades go down, parents will ask the teacher to
supervise their child's study; if a child's grades go up, parents
will simply be happy, not curious about the reasons behind
Mesosystem (example: because my parents had a very bad relationship in my second year of

junior high school, even to the point of divorce, I was very depressed during that

time, to escape from reality, I chose to study like crazy to divert my attention)

Peers Because of the ranking by grades, students will be labeled as

"good students" "bad students", even if two friends are very
close, if their grades are very different, there will inevitably
be a gap between them
Exosystem Social Media Many Social Media "sell anxiety" by suggesting that "society
is very competitive and people will be squeezed out if they
 don't work hard"
National There has been too little cultural enlightenment in Chinese
Historical history, especially after the founding of the People's Republic
Changes of China, and there were even movements of denial of
cultural diversity such as the Cultural Revolution.
Family The economic foundation of most families is still not solid,
Chronosystem Big Events and parents are often unable to complete the task of guiding
and accompanying their children during their formative years
since they have to work and earn money, while on the other
hand, the long-term disharmonious family relationships of
some families may also have some negative effects on the
children's learning mentality.
The Politics (one-party system),
general context current stage of economic development (high growth
Macrosystem of period),
Chinese society population pressure (from large total and unbalanced
structure)

★The role of the learner

In summary, learners are only recipients of the decisions of their parents, teachers and police makers,
even thought some of them might be able to go to some interest classes that they are really interested
in, but most of them have to drop those interest classes after they enter high school. There is little
space for them since they only get one task, or to say, they can only have one task, which is to go to
a TOP UNIVERSITY.
★The connections between Bronfenbrenner’s model and the UNCRC
After roughly reading both reading materials, I found that while both emphasize the learner's
initiative in the social context, the latter prefers to let authority be the gatekeeper, for example, in
Article 17 of the UNCRC, especially the last sentence, "Governments must help protect children
from materials that could harm them.", giving the government too much space and freedom, which
may allow some governments to take advantage of the opportunity to control the media and only
allow children to see government-approved content. The former, on the other hand, is more careful
to look at these aspects.