Earticle

This study focuses on the systemic distortion of assignment design in Chinese secondary vocational education specialized courses under the influence of examination-oriented application and the dominance of disciplinary knowledge logic. Employing an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, the research conducted a questionnaire survey of 706 teachers and 2,108 students in Zhejiang Province, China. Additionally, 68 teachers, students, and enterprise representatives were selected for in-depth interviews, complemented by a three-month textual analysis of assignments at the project establishment units of high-level secondary vocational school in Zhejiang Province to systematically explore the current status, dilemmas, and breakthrough paths of assignment design. The results indicate that current assignment design faces multiple dilemmas, including teleological deviation, monotypic forms, evaluative failure, and the suppression of subjectivity. These dilemmas are rooted in a systemic cycle of “institutional alienation,” where a weak support ecosystem and distorted assignment goals reinforce each other, forming path dependency. Based on these issues, this paper posits that the essence of this predicament is a paradigm misalignment in the knowledge production mode of vocational education, where a static view of disciplinary knowledge systematically squeezes the generative space of work-process knowledge; thus, assignment dilemmas are defined as the manifest result of this paradigm misalignment. Finally, the study proposes a theoretical paradigm shift from “institutional alienation” to “work-process knowledge generation,” constructing a “dual-synergy and three-dimensional support” operational logic. This provides micro-level theoretical support and practical paradigms for the “Three- Dimensional Reform” of teachers, teaching materials, and pedagogy, reconstructing secondary vocational specialized course assignments from the perspectives of epistemology, methodology, and operational logic. The theoretical contribution of this paper lies in elevating the issue of assignments from “instructional technique improvement” to the “reconstruction of vocational education knowledge production mechanisms,” providing an explanatory framework for understanding the structural obstacles to the characteristic features of vocational education under the pressure of East Asian credentialism, and offering implementable theoretical support for competency-based curriculum reform.