This entry lists primary and secondary research for the EPP Project. I’m currently unsure of how to word the topic, so I’m putting bullet points below and string them into a topic in the end.

Result-based education, psychology, mind control, application of fiction and illusion.

back to High School

I flew back to Beijing for a couple of reasons, one of which was to revisit my old high school where result-based education took place. I had several reasons for revisiting that was project-based: 1. To have a chat with my previous teachers, because I only had a student’s point of view on this topic; 2. To see the current work of students, and to observe how they interact with teachers in class and with fellow students; and 3. (which is slightly more abstract) Revisiting a place that had great emotional impact to me 5 years ago will re-stimulate that impact, and I will be able to remember more.

The teachers: They told me that they felt gratified that we as former students would tell them how our lives went through because they were stuck in a cycle of teaching students year after year.

the mode of teaching of my physics teacher: 15min at noon after lunch. He’s trying to make everything as efficient and as simple as possible for students to absorb, because he knows we’re in a result-based education background and the way students are accessed is by memorizing formulas of physics while a very small part of the test is designed for ppl who actually understand physics. (80% of memorizing formulas, 20% of understanding and analysing actual physics) so if you memorize everything on that sheet of paper, you can get 80 in physics in the College Entrance Exam. It’s that simple.

(How in the world can you find evidence to students’ minds??? I can’t directly assume that they have a linear way of thinking or not just by observing their behavior in a 15-min class) David’s email really helped with that.

Secondary Research

Psychology, how you control the mind, whether or not you control your individuality amongst society and if it makes a “better” impact,

Had a chat with Risa and her opinion on the rules of school was that it made sense and helped her to become who she is right now, so it had a positive impact rather than negative.

Risa: experience in both education systems in New Zealand and Thailand.

The Third-Wave Experiment…

the change I wanna see is people becoming more awake and aware of the controlling of their own minds when they are in a crowd.

I’m doing a project that is about how individuals’ minds are altered and controlled and their idiosyncrasies are suppressed in a result-based education background. Students in this type of background(I have limited the location to China) have a sort of secular Religion of Results, and define their success based on other people’s failures. The Believers of this “Religion of Results” have a conditioned thinking that is linear and beneficial to the development of China as a whole.

I have researched several psychological experts like Edward Bernays, the Freuds, and Herbert Marcuse(as well as B.F. Skinner, Ewen Cameron, and Jordan Peterson), and they have ideas that contradict each other on whether individuals’ inner drives are evil and whether it should be repressed to gain a more orderly society. With result-based education(RBE) in Chinese middle schools, high schools and universities, individuality is repressed and conformity is encouraged. This is good for the development of society as a whole, but bad for creative students, as well as students with Diverse Learning Styles, include students with dyslexia, ADHD,(very few are diagnosed in China) or those who learn best through hands-on experiences.

The main recipients I’m focusing on are the students, the stakeholders are students, parents, teachers, workplace employers, etc. I have done primary research on this topic by going back to my high school, mingling into the group of students and chatting with my former teachers. My school was very cautious on not letting any knowledge-based context leak out, so knowing that I wouldn’t necessarily get anything valuable if I told them I was researching for my topic, I went undercover and with my teacher’s consent, joined a 15-min physics class where the senior grade 3 students took every noon after lunch. I also observed what the teachers chose to ask a 2019 graduate. They mainly asked about the content of my MA and how it would benefit me to get a job in Beijing. Backtracking to my topic, I witness the majority of Chinese students are ignorant and only think in a linear way(currently unsure about how to prove that with the evidence I’ve got, I have some interviews on this topic back in 2021&2022, I’m skeptical to conduct interviews NOW for fear of conformation bias), and I witnessed that we were reluctant to speak our ideas in class when we were out of that sector.

I plan to conduct interviews with school counselors and examine the function of school counselors in Chinese high schools and universities, both research methods are used to find out what Chinese students are worried and anxious about. And whether they trust a school counselor to help them with their psychological concerns. (Currently unsure whether this part is relevant to the Religion of Results)

The change I REALLY want to see is for students, especially youngsters in middle schools and high schools, be AWARE(VERY aware) of what they are learning and be more critical and conduct more self-learning than just passively absorb what is taught in class. I have already seen content creators expressing their ideas about the by-products of result-based education on Chinese social media platforms such as Red and Bilibili, which attacks that linear mode of thinking by projecting the macroscopic view in a magnified dystopian way. People, especially youngsters(or the younger generation), are waking up after seeing their work and I plan to ask them (or do research on them about) their initial thoughts on why they created their work on this topic and what impact they have witnessed due to their art.

Changing the mindset is quite hard for it requires a psychological twist. I’m adding Derren Brown shows in this paragraph because I think I can learn from how he does his experiments in the streets and how he conducts his shows on the topics of creating illusions and mind control. I aim to write about the movement of social media on battling result-based education using art and creative methods, and how the minds of the audience(especially the students) had changed psychologically.

I’m writing a reflective piece of writing (1000 – 1300 words) describing how I have arrived at the stage of planning impact and change. It should also include a bibliography of source materials that I have used. This piece of reflective writing is supposed to give substance to a presentation which is a 3-min project pitch for the European Press Prize (a journalism competition).

Could you give me bullet points to outline what I should write in my reflective writing? Please contain a clear logic focusing on the topic of the impact of the Psychology of Young “Believers” in “Religion of Results”.