This study aims to draft the standard setting and assessment framework of seventh-graders’ science core competence for the 2018 National Curriculum, and to devise assessment examples. The 2018 Curriculum, which serves as guideline for the 12-year Compulsory Education program, is to be implemented in the fall of 2018, starting with first-graders in primary schools, junior high schools, and high schools. Until then, course design, school teaching and student learning will all be censored to conform to the 2018 Curriculum in effort to achieve its academic goal, but concerns for effective evaluation of school teaching and student learning will eventually come down to a reliable assessment. This study focuses on the seventh-graders and explores how the core competence in science as required in the 2018 Curriculum could be transformed into an assessment framework so as to examine learning results, how such assessment for science core competence should be constructed to gauge the core competence in its abstract form, and, lastly, how the standard of science core competence ought to be set to discern stratified level of science competence. This study should probe into the making of the science core competence assessment framework and the performance standards for the seventh-graders, the test examples, background surveys, and standard setting for seventh-grade science core competence.
