Page 50 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

XIA Lixin, LI Chenglong & SUN Jingqiong / An exploratory study on the construction of standards 049
and assessment of national reading based on multi-dimensional integration

examine 15-year-old students’ performance in reading, mathematics and science through three-
yearly surveys (OECD, 2012).Shanghai has also involved in the program (Pan, 2012).The NAEP
project is run by the National Assessment Governing Board. As one of the subprojects, reading
assessment results present a broad view of what American students know and can do in reading
(Ni, Zheng, & Ye, 2014).Furthermore, PISA and PIRLS launched the electronic reading assessment
in 2009 and 2011, respectively (Liao & Zhu, 2010).
In particular, the National Reading Plan (NRP) created in 2006 among the Portuguese
population, is one of the few existing assessment programs that covers the whole country. It is a
wide-ranging and multifaceted program, which comes under the responsibility of the Ministry of
Education, acting in articulation with other government departments. As the complexity on various
levels, evaluating NRP should adopt a mixed-method approach, which uses a number of extensive/
quantitative, and intensive/qualitative methodological operations to gather information from a
broad range of sources (Hu, Chen, & Zhang, 2015). The NRP acts in different contexts, such as
schools and libraries, and continuously and systematically monitors and analyzes the way in which
the program is developed and implemented. It maps the diversity of projects, situations, and actors,
and encompasses a variety of factors, to generate an integrative evaluation (Da Costa, Pegado,
Avila, & Coelho, 2013).
There are relatively large number of research and practice on the national reading assessment
in China, but in a decentralized state, which focuses on solving local problems, and lacks
coordination and interaction with each other. It is necessary to develop an assessment standard
involving different levels and dimensions from the top-level design, based on referencing and
combining existing assessments, to make current national reading programs integrated and
coordinated from the fragmented state, to improve the systematic construction and administration
of national reading, and to provide support and guarantee for China’s culture development.

2 The assessment standard for national reading

In this paper, we develop a national reading assessment framework from three dimensions:
organization, resource and user (see Figure 1).An integrated evaluation system should build on
the organization and user dimensions, besides the reading resources evaluation. 1) Organization
dimension reflects the assessment level of national reading, namely macro, meso and micro levels,
which indicates that the assessment is for the nation, region/industry, or primary units; 2) User
dimension represents the value of national reading assessment, which is citizens-centered. It refines
user groups, and evaluates users’ reading needs, status and literacy according to their occupation,
age, and reading ability; 3) Resource dimension refers to the objects that are evaluated, covering
the production, transfer and use of various reading materials.