Recently, Professor Cui Yunhuo, director of the Curriculum Institute, published an academic article titled "Teaching-Learning-Assessment Consistency: The Key to Deepening Curriculum and Teaching Reform" in the 2024 issue 1 of "China Basic Education".

Professor Cui Yunhuo, ICI Director

Consistency in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment is Key to Deepening Curriculum and Teaching Reform

"If the curriculum is strong, then the children are strong; if the children are strong, then the nation is strong." The construction of a strong educational nation requires the support of a robust curriculum, and a powerful curriculum must be implemented and reflect the consistency of teaching, learning, and assessment. In April 2022, the Ministry of Education issued the 2022 version of the Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan and Curriculum Standards (hereinafter referred to as "the New Plan" and "the New Standards"), outlining the goals for educating and nurturing talent in the new era and the important paths for deepening curriculum and teaching reform. One such path is the consistency of teaching, learning, and assessment. This consistency connects the macro-level path design with the micro-level curriculum implementation, facilitating the transformation of the ideal blueprint for education at the curriculum plan level into a realistic picture at the curriculum teaching level. It is key to deepening the reform of basic education curriculum and an important fulcrum for leveraging the high-quality development of basic education.

Ⅰ The Dual Implications of Consistency in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

The consistency of teaching, learning, and assessment is an important manifestation of curriculum thinking, aimed at guiding the teaching and assessment in the curriculum and classroom through a series of professional and technical standards. This addresses the issue of "gaps" in hierarchical curriculum implementation, ultimately achieving the synergistic effect of curriculum elements on educating students. Specifically, this consistency has dual implications in terms of both the curriculum and the classroom.
1. Curriculum level
At the curriculum level, the consistency emphasizes guiding the systematic advancement of textbook compilation, teaching, and examination assessment based on curriculum standards, implementing the core literacy goals carried by the curriculum standards. This forms a "large closed loop" of consistency in curriculum reform path construction, integrating textbooks, teaching, and examination and assessment.

In this "closed loop" education system, textbooks, teaching, and examination assessment are not independent "pearls" but a "necklace" strung together under the guidance of curriculum standards. The New Standards construct a core literacy-oriented "family of objectives" consisting of "curriculum objectives-content/academic requirements-academic quality standards," serving as the basic compliance and direct basis for textbook compilation, teaching advancement, and examination evaluation. This requires that teaching must start from the curriculum standards and textbooks and eventually return to the curriculum standards through examination evaluation, thus forming a "large closed loop" in the path of curriculum reform.

2.Classroom Level

At the classroom level, the consistency emphasizes the systematic promotion of teaching, learning, and assessment consistency on the classroom teaching reform level, guided by learning objectives transformed from curriculum standards. This forms a "small closed loop," achieving what is taught is what is learned, and what is taught is what is assessed, and what is learned is what is assessed. It emphasizes using assessment to promote teaching and learning, ensuring the effective implementation of learning objectives.

The consistency in this level is a "small closed loop" within the "large closed loop" of curriculum-level consistency, with a linkage mechanism. On the one hand, curriculum standards, centered on core literacy, are the eternal "home" of subject education, and teaching reform aims to better "bring students home." The "large closed loop" guides the "small closed loop" from top to bottom, with the "small closed loop" relying on curriculum standards to construct learning objectives and clarify the path for guiding teaching reform. This is the concrete transformation of the "teaching" element of the "large closed loop" in micro-practice. On the other hand, the consistency in classroom level embeds curriculum thinking in specific teaching practices, enhancing the collaborative effect of teaching, learning, and assessment. By constructing and implementing superior curriculum standards through learning objectives, teachers achieve the goals of lessons/units/terms. This realizes the curriculum's "large closed loop" on the basis of achieving the classroom's "small closed loop," highlighting the "small closed loop's" support for the "large closed loop" from bottom to top.

Ⅱ The significance of teaching-learning-assessment consistency

The teaching-learning-assessment consistency adheres to the professional curriculum thinking and is guided by the goals, which is conducive to playing its important role in curriculum implementation, effective teaching, and teacher development.


1.Helps reducing the "gap" problem of course implementation in path construction

In the process of implementing the new curriculum standards, there will inevitably be two major "gaps" or "inconsistencies" in textbooks and teaching. Implementing consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment is crucial for reducing these implementation "gaps." The formal curriculum, in its implementation and transformation, may experience omissions, additions, or distortions due to different levels of operation and interpretation by schools. No matter how reasonable the top-level design of the curriculum scheme is, if the teaching reform is not implemented and followed up, it will only lead to the "suspension" and "disconnection" of the curriculum reform concept, let alone the cultivation of students' core competencies. According to Goodlad, J. I.'s five-level theory of curriculum implementation, China's new curriculum practice is broadly reflected in five specific implementation levels: new standards, new textbooks, new teaching plans, new classrooms, and new assessments. The dual implications of consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment adhere to the educational guidance of the new standards, linking the three major elements of new textbooks, new teaching, and new assessments. This not only embeds the consistency oriented towards core competency goals but also carries the consistency in curriculum content organization and learning method transformation in textbooks, teaching, exams, and assessments. Implementing learning objectives according to curriculum standards and adopting classroom teaching to embrace curriculum reform promotes the linkage between curriculum schemes and implementation, thus beneficially reducing the "gap" issues in curriculum implementation.

2.Facilitates Effective Teaching Guided by Learning Objectives

While helping to reduce the "gaps" in curriculum implementation, consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment drives classroom-level teaching reform with specific learning objectives, facilitating effective teaching. Effective teaching is not a rational speculation but an inference based on evidence. The only evidence of "effective" teaching is the achievement of objectives, proving what students have learned. Unlike the "education-teaching" mindset, which emphasizes what content should be learned under a teacher-oriented approach, the "curriculum-teaching" mindset strengthens the guiding role of objectives and the monitoring role of evaluation, focusing on "what is learned" from the students' perspective, thus professionalizing school education with curriculum thinking. Under the guidance of curriculum thinking, the dual implications of consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment are constructed. In specific classroom teaching, learning objectives, derived from the "large closed loop" of curriculum standards, become the premise and soul of consistency, providing important guidance for effective teaching; evaluation embeds by collecting evidence to determine the achievement of learning objectives and by feedback to improve teaching and learning, offering significant evidence and drive for effective teaching. Therefore, based on consistency, effective teaching targets guidance and relies on evaluation, facilitating its true implementation.

3.Promotes Teachers' Professional Autonomous Development in Curriculum Implementation

Enhancing teachers' professional capabilities is crucial for deepening curriculum and teaching reforms, and implementing teaching-learning-assessment consistency is a significant manifestation of professional practice. In the advancement of curriculum reform, frontline teachers may resist curriculum changes due to various factors, thereby diminishing the effectiveness of curriculum implementation. Harvey, T., identified 15 factors contributing to the "resistance" psychology during change implementation, including lack of ownership, no return on investment, increased burden, lack of administrative support, with the lack of ownership being foremost. Harvey's solution encourages deep involvement by relevant personnel to motivate them. Curriculum reform is not "anti-teacher" but requires teachers to deeply involve themselves with the concept of "teacher as researcher," allowing them to genuinely feel participation and ownership. The dual implications of consistency involve both the macro-level construction of curriculum reform paths and the micro-level specific curriculum implementation; it includes top-level design by experts and ensures flexible space for frontline teachers in classroom teaching design. The mechanism linking the "small closed loop" with the "large closed loop" considers the voices and discourses of curriculum experts and subject teachers, enabling teachers to genuinely feel their professional autonomy and responsibility for curriculum reform. This, in turn, promotes the professional autonomous development of teachers, supporting the construction of a high-quality teaching staff.

III. The Essence of Practice for Consistency in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

To promote the grounding and transformation of consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment, teachers must not only focus on the central guiding role of objectives but also properly manage the relationship among teaching, learning, and assessment. This involves embedding these elements into the new curriculum implementation process and implementing them through the construction of new objectives, the development of new teaching plans, and the design of new evaluations.

1.Constructing New Objectives to Strengthen the Educational Guidance of Curriculum Objectives

Both the curriculum standards at the curriculum level and the learning objectives at the classroom level highlight the core position of objective construction in the consistency of teaching, learning, and assessment. In other words, the fundamental adherence to consistency is the educational objectives guided by core competencies, with the curriculum implementation of consistency being the practice of curriculum reform dominated by educational objectives under core competencies guidance.

At the macro level, teachers should base their efforts on reality to construct and transform objectives within curriculum standards. The new objectives of the new plan, guided by core competencies, have constructed a hierarchical "tree-planting" system of "educational objectives- curriculum standards- teaching objectives" and a "family of objectives" guided by core competencies of "curriculum objectives-content/academic requirements-academic quality standards", surpassing "three-dimensional objectives" and providing support and guidance for the overall advancement and implementation of the new curriculum, offering an important basis for implementing consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment. However, it is also necessary to periodically carry out revisions of the curriculum standards, ensuring the contemporary value of educational objectives in the curriculum standards through research on "three sources" (research on learners, contemporary social life, and suggestions from subject experts).

At the micro level, teachers should strengthen curriculum thinking in specific teaching, systematically constructing teaching/learning objectives, which can be advanced through the "five-step, three-question method". First, consider "what to teach" by analyzing the content of textbooks to clarify the learning content within a unit of time. Second, regarding "academic quality", base decisions on curriculum standards and clarify the academic requirements for the teaching content by comparing them with academic quality standards. Third, think about "competency requirements" by connecting the core competencies that the course aims to cultivate based on the clear teaching content and academic quality, considering the key abilities, essential character, and value concepts students need to master through content learning. Fourth, ask "three questions": what results are needed from this content teaching, what process and methods are necessary to achieve the learning objectives from the student learning perspective, and what specific manifestations of competencies can be seen through the aforementioned processes. On this basis, objectives can be narrated using the structure "through (process), obtain (results), form/can complete (performance)". Fifth, check "assessability" based on SMART criteria to consider whether the narrated objectives are clear and assessable, including Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, one objective for the teaching of travelogues in the fifth unit of the People's Education Press Chinese textbook for the fourth grade of primary school could be narrated as: "Through thorough reading of four travelogues (process), clarify the methods of describing scenery by following the order of visitation, changing scenes, focusing on key points, and writing about changes to enrich reading experience (results), and feel the magnificent landscapes and great rivers and mountains of the motherland, showing a love for the country's rivers and mountains (performance)."

2.Leveraging Deep Classroom Teaching Transformation through New Teaching Plan Development

The new teaching plan is a key link in reducing "gaps" in curriculum implementation, connecting the path design of consistency in curriculum meaning with the scheme carrier of consistency in classroom meaning. It is crucial for linking the "large closed loop" and the "small closed loop", thus an important means for advancing consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment, and achieving high-quality "teaching" and "learning".

In the process of developing new teaching plans, teachers should first consider the main issues with old teaching plans and then "prescribe the right remedy". First, old teaching plans, influenced by fragmented knowledge teaching, present problems of weighing on knowledge and light on competency and often narrated according to the three objectives of knowledge and skills, processes and methods, and emotions, attitudes, and values, lacking integration and overlooking the wholeness of competencies. Second, constrained by traditional teacher-centered orientations, old teaching plans focus on the teacher, neglecting the shift towards a student-centered stance and lacking implementation of the concept of teaching for learning, making it difficult to achieve "what is learned is what is taught". Third, in operation, they are limited to class periods, artificially segmenting students' complete learning experiences with rigid class times (40-45 minutes), affecting the organization and construction of student learning experiences. Fourth, they lack designs for post-learning reflection, with teachers more often acting as information transmitters and not integrating the reflection phase into an effective learning process, making it difficult for students to establish connections between themselves and knowledge, let alone cultivate core competencies. Fifth, they weaken the role of evaluation, artificially postposing and detaching evaluation from teaching, hindering the realization of consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment in the teaching process.

Based on this, organized learning experiences can be relied upon in the design of student experience plan (SEP), carrying out big-unit teaching. SEP is a professional plan for promoting students' autonomous construction or social construction of learning experiences. It is designed by teachers in the context of classroom teaching, revolving around a learning unit, starting from what students are expected to learn. It involves unit themes and class periods, learning objectives, evaluation tasks, learning processes, homework and tests, and post-learning reflection. One of the keys to implementing a SEP is to narrate objectives with a competency orientation, using the structure "through (process), obtain (results), form/can complete (performance)" to narrate objectives. Another key is to undertake reverse design based on the student learning stance, preposition evaluation tasks to serve as a "supervisor" verifying whether teaching objectives have been achieved, integrated into classroom teaching and learning. The third key is to systematically design the post-learning reflection phase, promoting students' integration, transfer, and application of learned knowledge through the logic of "retelling-linking-transforming", thereby aiding the generation of core competencies. SEP is a scheme carrier for effectively carrying out large-unit teaching, allowing for systematic design around appropriate overarching centers such as big concepts, big tasks, big questions, etc., thereby leveraging deep classroom teaching transformation through new teaching plans.

3.Utilizing New Evaluation Design to Drive the Evaluation System

The shift from the "education-teaching" thinking paradigm to the "curriculum-teaching" thinking paradigm has gradually moved curriculum teaching reform from "what teachers should teach" to "what students can learn", with the key to determining what students "have learned" being evaluation. Therefore, as a core element of consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment, evaluation carries the essence of curriculum thinking, with the new evaluation design playing a driving role in the implementation of consistency being another essential practice.

At the macro level, new evaluation designs under core competency guidance should focus on transforming traditional paper-based exam evaluations, emphasizing the use of performance evaluations. Performance evaluation, with core competency-oriented objectives, real situational performance tasks, and corresponding evaluation metrics as three elements, integrates the teaching process, learning process, and evaluation process, summarizing both summative and formative evaluations, with students' real "performances" serving as an important basis for cultivating core competencies, and can be an important means for new evaluations. Simultaneously, it's necessary to rely on technology empowerment to advance the digital transformation of evaluation, focusing on process evaluation, leveraging new technologies' advantages in collecting process data, creating space for promoting teaching and learning through evaluation.

At the micro level, teachers carrying out teaching design should genuinely consider the paradigm shift in classroom evaluation, grasping its change from summative to formative "orientation", and from teacher authority-led to active student participation, actively moving from "evaluation of learning" towards "evaluation for learning" and "evaluation as learning", systematically carrying out evaluation task design. When designing evaluation tasks, teachers should consider whether the evaluation task matches the learning objectives in terms of content coverage, cognitive conditions, and difficulty level? Whether it allows students to clearly understand its content, i.e., whether it is rooted in real situations and the instructions are clear? Whether it is feasible under time, space, and objective conditions? Additionally, the embedding of evaluation tasks in the teaching process needs to be considered, monitoring whether related objectives are achieved, and providing information for optimizing and improving teaching decisions. Specifically, a classic application model is to rely on Objective 1 to design Teaching Segment 1, then integrate Evaluation Task 1 into Teaching Segment 1...... (See "China Basic Education", Issue 1, 2024). Certainly, teachers can also rely on this classic model for variant applications in specific teaching designs, flexibly embedding evaluation tasks into various teaching and learning segments.

It is especially important to emphasize that evaluation in consistency should not be limited to judging the achievement of learning objectives. It is the bridge between teaching and learning, with its key function being to obtain relevant information about students in the learning process, then using this information to support subsequent teaching and learning decisions, thereby ensuring the effective implementation of consistency.

In summary, consistency in teaching, learning, and assessment is key to deepening curriculum teaching reform, representing the high-quality curriculum implementation path autonomously constructed by our people based on "curriculum thinking", strengthening the guidance of curriculum standards, and highlighting the important role of evaluation. Consistency not only enriches the construction of curriculum discourse with Chinese characteristics in theory but also condenses in practice the core technology for reducing "gaps" in curriculum implementation and ensuring implementation quality, serving as an important fulcrum for the deep advancement of core competency-oriented curriculum reform.