The North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education operates a development team for its essay and descriptive assessment questions. [North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education]
The North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education operates a development team for its essay and descriptive assessment questions. [North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education]

The North Gyeongsang Provincial Office of Education announced Monday it is forming a teacher-led team to develop essay and descriptive assessment questions, with the goal of spreading evaluation practices that track students' thinking processes and learning growth.

The project is part of a broader initiative called "A Great Transformation in Student Assessment in the AI Era in North Gyeongsang Province." It aims to build a province-specific model for essay and descriptive assessment by having classroom teachers develop the questions themselves, then apply and verify them in schools.

The development team will comprise more than 50 elementary, middle and high school teachers from across the province. The elementary school component, centered on International Baccalaureate-style essay and descriptive assessment, will operate under the theme of nurturing learning. The secondary school component will be divided into six subject areas: Korean language for cultivating thought, mathematics for building logic, English for fostering communication, social studies for developing perspective, science for encouraging inquiry, and a cross-curricular strand for embracing diversity.

The team will develop assessment materials in which questions, scoring criteria, model answers and feedback are organically linked, all grounded in curriculum achievement standards.

The team will go beyond jointly reviewing the questions. It will apply them in actual classrooms, analyze student responses and conduct collaborative scoring sessions to revise and refine the items.

Through this process, the office plans to improve the practical applicability of the assessment materials while strengthening teachers' expertise in assessment design and scoring.

The provincial education office will host a forum next month on the transformation of student assessment to share the direction of assessment innovation and examples of classroom practice.

"Essay and descriptive assessment goes beyond finding the right answer — it looks at how students think and how they express their thinking," North Gyeongsang Provincial Superintendent of Education Im Jong-sik said. "We will actively support the stable establishment of assessments that raise teachers' professional expertise and build students' capacity for critical thinking in schools."


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