Comprehensive quality evaluation of high school students on mental health status

It is essentially a developmental assessment tool that serves the growth of students and is by no means a threshold for screening students. All operations that grade and directly link psychological states with qualifications for further education violate the original intention of policy design and the basic ethics of psychological science.

A while ago, I followed the research team of a provincial education evaluation institute and visited three high schools of different levels. I happened to encounter three completely different implementation logics, which also happened to correspond to the two core differences that have been quarreling in the industry for almost three years. Interestingly, the first people who proposed that mental health should be included in comprehensive assessments were actually researchers in the field of clinical psychology. They originally wanted to solve the problem of schools not paying attention to psychological education in the past and only improvising when students had problems. However, when it was implemented, it changed its flavor and became the basis for quantitative screening in many schools. It can be regarded as a "mismatch of original intentions."

The first one I went to was the Head Office, which took the standard "quantitative assessment" route: they collaborated with universities to develop a set of exclusive scales, which divided anxiety, interpersonal compatibility, and stress tolerance into 12 scorable dimensions. Each item was scored from 1 to 5. The final calculated total score was directly put into the comprehensive evaluation file, and was divided into four levels: "excellent, good, average, and pending intervention." Last year, there was a boy who was a sophomore in high school. During that time, his parents were getting divorced. When he was filling out the questionnaire, he had insomnia for a week in a row. His score happened to be stuck in the "pending intervention" level. He was afraid that this would affect the initial review of his strong foundation plan, so he secretly went to the psychology teacher and cried for almost two hours to ask for a score change. It was originally just a short-term mood swing, but instead he developed a serious sleep disorder because he was worried about the file record. Most of the people who support this quantitative model are practitioners in the education management field, and the logic is very practical: the core requirement of comprehensive evaluation is fairness and traceability. If it is all vague and subjective descriptions, there is no guarantee that there will be no human manipulation and fraud, and it will be unfair to ordinary students. But as soon as this statement was put out, it was rebutted by researchers from the school of clinical psychology: The psychological state itself is dynamically fluctuating. Last week you failed in the mock test and scored low on the scale. This week you went out to climb a mountain with your friends and returned to your state. Using a single measurement result to label students as "healthy/unhealthy" is anti-scientific in itself.

In contrast, the approach of the ordinary high school in the urban area is much more convenient. They simply gave up on scoring. The mental health section of the comprehensive evaluation file only contains two types of traceable process records: one is the sign-in and experience of students participating in psychology courses, group counseling, and expansion activities. For example, whether you have attended an emotion management workshop or served as a class psychological liaison can be recorded.； The other type is an encrypted early warning ledger, which can only be seen by psychology teachers, moral education directors and contracted psychiatrists. It is not disclosed to the public at all. If a student is really found to be in serious emotional distress, parents and professionals will be contacted first to intervene, and relevant records will never be included in the school admission files. Of course, there are also voices of opposition: many parents feel that since this section does not give scores and is not linked to admissions, isn't it just a matter of making up the numbers? It is better to add more weight to social practice.

When I got to the county high school, these arguments suddenly seemed a bit "untenable." The "psychology teacher" of this school is Teacher Li, who teaches ideological and political education. She just spent 500 yuan to sign up for an online psychological counseling training class last month. She can't even remember the interpretation standards of the commonly used depression screening scale SCL-90, let alone conduct any structured evaluation. Her original words are particularly true: "What I can do now is to take one class a week to chat with the children. If I find something is wrong, I will say a few words. If you really want me to rate the children's mental health, I would not dare. If it is too high or too low, it will be a waste of time for others." ”Oh, by the way, this school just built a psychological counseling room last year. It didn’t even have a separate space for talking before. You said that under such basic conditions, talking about quantitative or qualitative evaluation is a bit too far.

When I was a psychological volunteer in a high school two years ago, I encountered even more outrageous practices: One school made "never actively visited a psychological counseling room" a necessary condition for the mental health evaluation. As a result, a girl in her sophomore year of high school had a clear tendency to self-harm, but she did not dare to come to us for fear of leaving a record of "psychological problems." In the end, it was the head teacher who found a fresh wound exposed in the sleeve of her school uniform and persuaded her to come over. What do you call this? It was originally a channel to help children, but instead became a trap for children to hide from, completely defeating the purpose of evaluation.

I had dinner with a teacher from the Ministry of Education’s Primary and Secondary Schools Mental Health Education Steering Committee a while ago, and I particularly agree with what he said: “Including mental health in the comprehensive assessment is essentially to force schools to take psychological education seriously, handing teachers a magnifying glass to take a closer look at the child’s condition, rather than stamping the child and blocking those in need from the university gate. ”After all, the ultimate goal of our evaluation is to allow more children to finish high school healthily and go on their own life path smoothly. If instead it forces children who already need help to be even more afraid to speak out, then it is really not worth the gain.