Changed and unchanged : the transformation of educational policies on assessment and evaluation in China

Chinese basic education has undergone profound changes since China introduced the market-oriented economy in the 1980s. All the social changes in the past four decades can be traced to the very first reform and opening-up policy in 1978, which were a historical turning point marking a new era in China. This Ph.D. dissertation investigates the transformation of Chinese basic education through educational reforms focused on quality evaluation and assessment. This dissertation was prepared during a consortium comparative project, funded by the Academy of Finland from 2014 to 2017, which investigated how the rise of quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) as an influential force has reshaped educational politics in three countries: Brazil, Russia and China (BCR). This dissertation focuses on one of these countries—China—and analyses how Chinese educational development has changed in interaction with its historical, cultural, political and global contexts. During educational development over the past four decades, the Chinese state has undertaken several rounds of reforms to improve basic education, first from a quantitative perspective and then from a qualitative perspective. The many reforms since the late 2000s have included the establishment of large-scale assessment. This dissertation locates educational changes at the interface of the global–local, the traditional–nonconventional and the political–apolitical to analyse the characteristics of the politics of change. The transformation of education evaluation and assessment has occurred within a changing, contested context fused with contests between multiculturalism and nationalism, internationalism and regionalism, elitism and populism, and many other -isms, such as neoliberalism, postmodernism and universalism. This dissertation takes a critical but constructive stance towards political studies of education and socio-cultural studies of China and re-assesses their strengths, limitations and applicability to analyse the politics of change in China. This article-based doctoral dissertation is grounded in three publications with three main themes: institutional changes, changes in political discourse, and changes in actors’ positions in policy-making. The data were collected in China during 2015 and 2016 using semi-structured interviews and snowball sampling. Qualitative thematic and discourse analysis were applied to analyse the data. Article I examines institutional transformation by analysing the developmental trajectory and institutionalisation process of educational changes. Drawing on institutional theory, this study finds that Chinese institutions of supervision have the flexibility to adapt to new environments through multiple methods, reinforcing their authority and positions in the political system. For instance, inspection (the old) incorporates assessment systems (the new) to increase its capacity. This finding challenges the traditional institutional understanding that new institutions replace old ones in the process of institutional learning. Article II analyses the discursive transformation of education politics focusing on the topic of education equality and equity based on the state’s official documents from 1980s. The analysis of political discourse indicates changes in political orientations and the reconstruction of political power. The study shows that in the Chinese official discourse, the political agenda decides how to recognise and define equality and equity. The state’s official discourse further defines the political reality of whether inequality is considered to be problematic and how policy is made to address inequality. Article III focuses on the role of Chinese experts in knowledge brokering and on changes in their status in Chinese education policy-making. Through analysing how local experts in China perceive global knowledge and what reasons support their actions in knowledge brokering, this study shows that Chinese Academic Experts representing Chinese top intellectuals display exclusive acceptance on the technical level and give mostly uncritical recognition to advancements in international educational assessment. Their acceptance of international large-scale assessment has led directly to the establishment of Chinese large-scale assessment. Behind the exclusive acceptance of the global education agenda of QAE, educational internationalisation has a hidden but strong nostalgic, nationalist agenda to restore China to its past status as a strong nation respected by all other countries. Through these three articles, this dissertation provides new insights into the study on politics of change, such as transformation of the object (being changed) and the subject (initiating change); the nature of time as not linear but relational and collective, as presented in cultural studies on the politics of change; and the significance of distinguishing the manifestations of change and the underlying ideas supporting change. In the Chinese context, particularly Chinese educational politics, the importance of cultural perspectives should be better acknowledged as they are interlinked to the core reasons why change happens or is resisted. Methodologically, this dissertation demonstrates that relational and transactional approaches can be used to explain the interrelationships between the causes and consequences of human actions and interactions.Muuttumattomuutta muutoksessa: arvioinnin koulutuspolitiikan muutokset Kiinassa Kiinan koulutusjärjestelmä on käynyt läpi merkittäviä muutoksia maan siirryttyä markkinavetoiseen talousjärjestelmään 1980-luvulta lähtien. Kuluneen neljän vuosikymmenen aikana tapahtuneet sosiaaliset muutokset alkoivat ensimmäisistä uudistuksista ja avautumispolitiikasta vuodelta 1978, joka oli merkittävä vedenjakaja ja uuden aikakauden alkupiste Kiinassa. Tässä väitöskirjassa tarkastellaan Kiinan peruskoulutuksen muutosta laadunarviointiin keskittyvien koulutusreformien näkökulmasta. Väitöskirja laadittiin osana Suomen Akatemian rahoittaman vertailevan tutkimuksen kenttään kuuluvaa konsortiotutkimushanketta. Projektissa tutkittiin, miten perusopetuksen laadunvarmistuksen ja -arvioinnin (Quality Assurance and Evaluation, QAE) voimistuminen merkittäväksi tekijäksi on muuttanut koulutuspolitiikkaa kolmessa maassa: Brasiliassa, Venäjällä sekä Kiinassa (Brazil, China, Russia; BCR). Väitöskirja keskittyy maista yhteen – Kiinaan – analysoiden, miten koulutuksen kehitys on muuttunut vuorovaikutuksessa historiallisen, kulttuurillisen ja globaalin kontekstin kanssa. Kiinan valtio on toteuttanut useita uudistuksia parantaakseen peruskoulutusta neljän viime vuosikymmenen aikana. Näitä uudistuksia on toteutettu aluksi määrällisestä ja myöhemmin laadullisesta näkökulmasta. 2000-luvun ensimmäisen vuosikymmenen lopulta lähtien toteutettuihin uudistuksiin sisältyy laajamittaisten arviointien käynnistäminen. Analysoidessaan muutoksen politiikkaa tämä väitöskirja paikallistaa koulutuksen muutokset globaalin ja paikallisen, perinteisen ja ei-tavanomaisen sekä poliittisen ja epäpoliittisen yhtymäkohtaan. Koulutuksen arvioinnin muutos on tapahtunut muuttuvassa ja kiistanalaisessa kontekstissa, jossa monikulttuurisuus ja nationalismi, kansainvälisyys ja regionalismi, elitismi ja populismi sekä monet muut ismit kuten neoliberalismi, postmodernismi ja universalismi kamppailevat. Tämä väitöskirja ottaa kriittisen, mutta samalla rakentavan asenteen yhtäältä koulutusta käsitteleviin politiikan tutkimuksiin sekä toisaalta Kiinaa koskeviin sosiokulttuurisiin tutkimuksiin. Näin toimiessaan se uudelleenarvioi niiden vahvuuksia, rajoitteita sekä käyttökelpoisuutta muutoksen politiikan analysointiin Kiinassa. Artikkeliväitöskirja perustuu kolmeen tutkimusjulkaisuun, jotka käsittelevät kolmea eri pääteemaa: institutionaalisia muutoksia, muutoksia poliittisessa diskurssissa sekä toimijoiden aseman muutoksia politiikanteossa. Aineisto kerättiin Kiinassa vuosina 2015 ja 2016 hyödyntäen puolistrukturoituja haastatteluja sekä harkinnanvaraista otosta (lumipallo-otanta). Aineiston analyysi toteutettiin käyttäen laadullista temaattista analyysiä sekä diskurssianalyysiä. Artikkeli I tutkii institutionaalista muutosta analysoimalla koulutuksen muutosten kehityskaarta sekä institutionaalisia prosesseja. Instituutioteoriasta ammentaen tutkimus osoittaa, että kiinalaisilla koulutuksen arviointijärjestelmillä on joustokykyä mukautua uuteen ympäristöön eri keinoin, vahvistaen näin auktoriteettiaan ja asemaansa poliittisessa järjestelmässä. Esimerkiksi vanha koulutuksen arviointijärjestelmä on sulauttanut itseensä uusia arviointijärjestelmiä kasvattaakseen toimintakykyään. Tämä havainto haastaa perinteisen institutionnaalisen ymmärryksen siitä, että institutionaalisen oppimisen prosessissa uudet instituutiot korvaavat edeltävät instituutiot. Artikkeli II analysoi koulutuspolitiikkaa koskevan diskurssin muutosta. Huomio keskittyy koulutuksen tasa-arvoisuuden ja oikeudenmukaisuuden teemaan valtion virallisissa dokumenteissa 1980-luvulta eteenpäin. Poliittisen diskurssin analyysistä nousee esiin poliittisten suuntautumisen muutoksia sekä poliittisen vallan uudelleenrakentamista. Tutkimus osoittaa, että Kiinan virallisessa diskurssissa poliittinen agenda ratkaisee, miten tasa-arvoisuus ja oikeudenmukaisuus tunnustetaan ja määritellään. Valtion virallinen diskurssi määrittelee lisäksi poliittisen todellisuuden koskien kysymystä siitä, nähdäänkö epätasa-arvo ongelmallisena, ja miten epätasaarvoon keskittyvää politiikkaa toteutetaan. Artikkeli III keskittyy kiinalaisten asiantuntijoiden rooliin tiedonvälittäjinä sekä heidän statuksensa muutokseen Kiinan koulutuspolitiikan toteutuksessa. Tutkimus analysoi, miten paikalliset asiantuntijat Kiinassa kokevat globaalin tiedon, ja mitkä syyt tukevat heidän toimiaan tiedonvälittämisessä. Artikkeli osoittaa, että kiinalaisten yliopistojen asiantuntijat hyväksyvät poikkeuksetta teknisen tason ja antavat pääosin varauksettoman tunnustuksen edistysaskelille kansainvälisessä koulutuksen arvioinnissa. Heidän kansainvälisiin, laajan mittakaavan arviointeihin, kohdistuva hyväksyntänsä on johtanut suoraan kiinalaisen arviointijärjestelmän syntyyn. Globaalin arvioinnin ja laadunvarmistuksen käytänteiden hyväksymisen ja institutionalisoitumisen taustalla on kätketty ja samalla nostalginen ja nationalistinen agenda palauttaa Kiina takaisin voimakkaaksi, muiden maiden kunnioittamaksi kansakunnaksi Näiden kolmen artikkelin kautta väitöskirja tarjoaa uusia näkemyksiä politiikan muutoksen tutkimukseen. Nimenomaisesti väitöskirja keskittyy muutoksen kohteena olevaan objektiin ja muutosta ajavaan subjektiin sekä ajan luonteeseen suhteellisena ja kollektiivisena (kuten muutoksen politiikkaa koskevissa kulttuuritutkimuksissa tehdään sen sijaan, että se nähtäisiin lineaarisena). Väitöskirja osoittaa merkittävyyden tunnistaa muutoksen ilmentymät sekä muutoksen takana olevat ajatukset. Kiinan kontekstissa ja etenkin Kiinan koulutuspolitiikan osalta kulttuurillisten perspektiivien merkitys tulisi tunnistaa, koska ne kytkeytyvät niihin juurisyihin, jotka johtavat muutokseen tai niiden vastustamiseen

Effects of quality assurance and evaluation on schools’ room for action

The chapter investigates the ways in which local authorities utilise quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) to govern schools. It also studies how schools react to QAE policies as political actors, that is, how they use them to obtain resources and power. The analysis draws on a combination of governance theories and on an understanding of the political frame of organisational analysis. Data were collected in selected localities in Brazil, China, and Russia through document analysis, interviews, and observations. We demonstrate that QAE instruments are reinterpreted locally in accordance with pre-existing practices of quality control and school governance and are biased towards local actors’ political interests. High-performing schools can thus utilise QAE policies to draw political power from sources such as expertise, access to agenda setting, and the construction of networks and coalitions, while low performers are increasingly disadvantaged. Schools’ reputations act as a key to virtuous or vicious cycles in which schools find themselves ensnared in the implementation of performance evaluation. Room for action for those schools which oppose new QAE policies is quite scarce. However, schools can practise hidden resistance and to some extent avoid the penetration of QAE tools in schools’ internal processes.Peer reviewe

Preparation and In Vitro/In Vivo Evaluation of Vinpocetine Elementary Osmotic Pump System

Preparation and in vitro and in vivo evaluation of vinpocetine (VIN) elementary osmotic pump (EOP) formulations were investigated. A method for the preparation of VIN elementary osmotic pump tablet was obtained by adding organic acid additives to increase VIN solubility. VIN was used as the active pharmaceutical ingredient, lactose and mannitol as osmotic agent. Citric acid was used as increasing API solubility and without resulting in the API degradation. It is found that the VIN release rate was increasing with the citric acid amount at a constant range. Cellulose acetate 398-3 was employed as semipermeable membrane containing polyethylene glycol 6000 and diethyl-o-phthalate as pore-forming agent and plasticizer for controlling membrane permeability. In addition, a clear difference between the pharmacokinetic patterns of VIN immediate release and VIN elementary osmotic pump formulations was revealed. The area under the plasma concentration-time curve after oral administration of elementary osmotic pump formulations was equivalent to VIN immediate release formulation. Furthermore, significant differences found for mean residence time, elimination half-life, and elimination rate constant values corroborated prolonged release of VIN from elementary osmotic pump formulations. These results suggest that the VIN osmotic pump controlled release tablets have marked controlled release characters and the VIN osmotic pump controlled release tablets and the normal tablets were bioequivalent

Consideration of weld distortion throughout the identification of fatigue curve parameters using mean stress correction

The effect of weld angular distortion on fatigue test specimens cut from butt welded plates is investigated by experimental and numerical methods. The weld specimens are made of a structural steel equivalent to BS 4360 grade 50D. The SN curve obtained from experimental data is used with the fatigue post-processor nCode DesignLife for fatigue life prediction. Mean stress correction is applied using the FKM approach to address the component of bending stress induced by clamping the distorted specimen, which is constant during the fatigue test. A parameter identification procedure for the SN curve and mean stress correction is proposed. The weld SN curve evaluated using the procedure is compared to the generic weld SN curves provided in the material database of nCode DesignLife and discussed

Shifting discourses of equality and equity of basic education: an analysis of national policy documents in China

As the world’s second-largest economy, China faces great challenges in educational equality and equity. This article examines the evolution of discourses surrounding educational equality by focusing on how Chinese central governments from the 1980s to the 2010s have formulated this issue. Through key national policy documents and drawing upon Espinoza’s equality–equity model, we analyse the sociopolitical context of changes in China’s educational discourse and come to the conclusions that in the 1980s, shifting the government’s agenda to economic reforms, national poverty subsumed the issue of educational equality. In the 1990s, according to the inherited political rationale, the government treated educational inequality as a ‘necessary process’ of Chinese socialist market economy. Since the 2000s, equality and equity has become an ‘urgent issue’ as the government’s agenda has shifted focus to stabilizing the nation’s economy and society. We propose labelling these three stages of equality–equity discursive departure in the 1980s, continuity and rupture in the 1990s, and prioritization since the 2000s.</div

A construction of strongly regular Cayley graphs and their applications to codebooks

In this paper, we give a kind of strongly regular Cayley graphs and a class of codebooks. Both constructions are based on choosing subsets of finite fields, and the main tools that we employed are Gauss sums. In particular, these obtained codebooks are asymptotically optimal with respect to the Welch bound and they have new parameters

Scale-dependent effects of climate and geographic distance on bacterial diversity patterns across northern China's grasslands.

Patterns of variation in plant and animal diversity along precipitation gradients have been extensively studied, but much less is known about how and to what extent precipitation affects the biogeographic distribution of microbial diversity in arid areas across large spatial scales. Here we collected soils from 54 sites along a 3700 km transect covering a wide range of grassland ecosystems with distinct aridity gradients. We quantified the bacterial community diversity and the effects of climate, edaphic parameter and geographic distance on the bacterial community structure using high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Of the 35 phyla detected, 6 were dominant: Actinobacteria, Acidobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, Deltaproteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Planctomycetes. Aridity was a major factor influencing bacterial diversity, community composition and taxon abundance. Although the pattern of bacterial species richness is markedly different from that of plant species richness, most soil bacteria were endemic to particular bioregions like macro-organisms. Community similarity significantly declined with environmental distance and geographic distance (r = -0.579 and -0.773, respectively). Geographic distance (historical contingencies) contributed more to bacterial community variation (36.02%) than combined environmental factors (24.06%). Overall, our results showed that geographic distance and climatic factors concurrently govern bacterial biogeographic patterns in arid and semi-arid grassland

Layers of reflectivity in comparative research

This chapter addresses the empirical and analytical questions of our research. It draws on the idea of reflective research and discusses the questions of case selection and comparability, as well as the questions of power and interpretation arising from fieldwork, data collection, and comparative analysis. Research journey narratives are used to consider field access and ethical issues, and they produce another layer of research data about the manifestations of QAE. The chapter also reflects on differences in the availability of data from the three countries and the limitations in this regard for a comparative analysis. To compare the dynamics which emerge in the politics of quality in the different contexts, the chapter describes the analytical dimensions the book uses in more depth and discusses the abductive research design, in which theoretical and empirical work are complementary. The conclusion discusses how fieldwork can be used to understand the studied phenomenon.Peer reviewe

Robust 3.7 V-Na2/3_{2/3}[Cu1/3_{1/3}Mn2/3_{2/3}]O2_2 Cathode for Na-ion Batteries

Na-ion batteries (NIBs), which are recognized as a next-generation alternative technology for energy storage, still suffer from commercialization constraints due to the lack of low-cost, high-performance cathode materials. Since our first discovery of Cu$^{3+}$/Cu$^{2+}$ electrochemistry in 2014, numerous Cu-substituted/doped materials have been designed for NIBs. However for almost ten years, the potential of Cu$^{3+}$/Cu$^{2+}$ electrochemistry has been grossly underappreciated and normally regarded as a semielectrochemically active redox. Here, we re-synthesized P2-Na$_{2/3}$[Cu$_{1/3}$Mn$_{2/3}$]O$_2$ and reinterpreted it as a high-voltage, cost-efficient, air-stable, long-life, and high-rate cathode material for NIBs, which demonstrates a high operating voltage of 3.7 V and a completely active Cu$^{3+}$/Cu$^{2+}$ redox reaction. The 2.3 Ah cylindrical cells exhibit excellent cycling (93.1% capacity after 2000 cycles), high rate (97.2% capacity at 10C rate), good low-temperature performance (86.6% capacity at -30$^\circ$C), and high safety, based on which, a 56 V-11.5 Ah battery pack for E-bikes is successfully constructed, exhibiting stable cycling (96.5% capacity at the 800th cycle) and a long driving distance (36 km, tester weight 65 kg). This work offers a commercially feasible cathode material for low-cost, high-voltage NIBs, paving the way for advanced NIBs in power and stationary energy storage applications.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Crop pest image classification based on improved densely connected convolutional network

IntroductionCrop pests have a great impact on the quality and yield of crops. The use of deep learning for the identification of crop pests is important for crop precise management.MethodsTo address the lack of data set and poor classification accuracy in current pest research, a large-scale pest data set named HQIP102 is built and the pest identification model named MADN is proposed. There are some problems with the IP102 large crop pest dataset, such as some pest categories are wrong and pest subjects are missing from the images. In this study, the IP102 data set was carefully filtered to obtain the HQIP102 data set, which contains 47,393 images of 102 pest classes on eight crops. The MADN model improves the representation capability of DenseNet in three aspects. Firstly, the Selective Kernel unit is introduced into the DenseNet model, which can adaptively adjust the size of the receptive field according to the input and capture target objects of different sizes more effectively. Secondly, in order to make the features obey a stable distribution, the Representative Batch Normalization module is used in the DenseNet model. In addition, adaptive selection of whether to activate neurons can improve the performance of the network, for which the ACON activation function is used in the DenseNet model. Finally, the MADN model is constituted by ensemble learning.ResultsExperimental results show that MADN achieved an accuracy and F1Score of 75.28% and 65.46% on the HQIP102 data set, an improvement of 5.17 percentage points and 5.20 percentage points compared to the pre-improvement DenseNet-121. Compared with ResNet-101, the accuracy and F1Score of MADN model improved by 10.48 percentage points and 10.56 percentage points, while the parameters size decreased by 35.37%. Deploying models to cloud servers with mobile application provides help in securing crop yield and quality