给青年学生们减负

Education authorities in Beijing have brought in 8 new rules to try to ease the workload on primary and middle-school students.

CRI's Zhang Wan has the details.

Some of the measures Beijing is taking to ease the burden on young students include exempting first and second grade students from homework, banning all mid-term exams, and fixing limits for the amount of assignment work, , in the subjects of Chinese language, maths and English, that can be set for students between the third to sixth grade.

According to the new measures, assignments for third and fourth grade students must be able to be completed within 30 minutes, and for fifth and sixth grade students, within one hour.

Luo Jie, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education explains.

"When it comes to easing the burden on young students, we should start with the assignment of homework. After carefully selecting homework for students, teachers should also guide students on how to complete the work."

In a primary school in Chaoyang district, the head teacher of each class is required to closely monitor the total daily amount of homework assigned to students, which, for the subjects of Chinese language, maths, and English language should not exceed 30 minutes each. Liu Lihong is a subject department head within the school:

"Every month we carry out an evaluation of the total amount of daily and weekly homework, which allows us see the average load of a student each month. In March, the amount of daily homework totaled 26 minutes on average."

Experts say the key point of easing the burden on young students lies in reforming the system for evaluating students, as exam scores should not be the only gauge for evaluating their academic performance.

Zhang Zhaohui, deputy director of the Commission of Education of Chaoyang district, says that in primary schools in the Chaoyang district, the physical and psychological conditions of the students are also included in school and teacher evaluation systems.

"We set up special gauge to evaluate schools, which currently works beyond simply measuring student exam scores"

Luo Jie, deputy director of Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, says a more important issue in education today is to ensure that every student learns well.

"Elementary education is one of the most important periods in a person's development. We should turn our focus from "ensuring everyone receives the elementary education" to "ensuring everyone learns well". This is what we should be pursuing right now."

In the Chaoyang district primary school, teachers are evaluated by three gauges, including student exam scores, teaching quality, as well as cultivation of students' interest. The school never makes comparisons of the students' test results.

Chen Lihua, principal of the school, says the school only compares the average score of each class, instead of each student; additionally, the evaluation of the teachers has no direct correlation with the students' test scores.

A greater emphasis is also currently being placed on spare time being spent on play rather than homework, and outdoor exercises are being promoted to encourage students to participate in at least one hour of physical activity every day.

Many parents have expressed their hope that their children's spare time no longer be occupied by heavy workloads so that they can pursue their extracurricular interests. This could be a positive step for cultivating future generations of students, through encouraging all-round development.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.