BEIJING, July 28 (Xinhua) -- A report on the quality of China's compulsory education, which covers primary and junior middle schools, said the students' abilities in music and art appreciation need to be improved.
While praising the sound academic performances among the students, the report, released by the National Assessment Center for Education Quality under the Ministry of Education, found that the students were weaker in basic music and aesthetic understanding and appreciation.
The report was based on monitoring conducted by the center between 2015 and 2017, which assessed 572,314 fourth-grade and eighth-grade students in 973 county-level regions across China. It also surveyed 19,346 primary and secondary school headmasters and 147,610 teachers.
Most of the students -- 82.6 percent in fourth grade and 86.1 percent in eighth grade -- were able to sing songs in full fluently, it said.
However, when it came to the discerning of the rhythm, tempo, and timbre of music, only about half of the students gave the right answers.
Only 60 percent of the students could correctly recognize the genres, forms, and emotional elements of the music.
Those who can accurately identify the colors, lines, symmetries and spatial elements of artworks only accounted for about 60 percent of the students assessed.
