Research On Science Process Skills Of Chemistry Curriculum

Improving student's abilities and fostering student's scientific literacy are the ultimate goal of science education. However, in order to achieve the goal, some concrete steps must be taken. One of the basic steps is to train students' science process skills. In this dissertation, the author analyzed the overall process of scientific research and the goal of science education. The comprehensive goal of science process skills of chemistry curriculum was constructed, the essential factors of science process skills were analyzed, and the levels of goal were categorized. The author redefined the concept of science process skills, based on the broad domestic and foreign research results. Science process skills were known as the basic skills that scientists needed in their scientific research. It consists of intelligence skill and experimental hand-on skill. The core is the intelligence skill. It is the basic skills that students should learn in their scientific inquiry activities. The science process skill falls into the generalized knowledge and the generalized skill. It is the cornerstone of scientific method and the important integral part of scientific inquiry ability. It has the extremely strong relationship with the intelligence.The idea of science process skills is based on the educational thought of scientific process. The educational thought of scientific process originated in the educational thought of scientific method. Since then, it evolved gradually to the educational thought of scientific inquiry. As an approach of learning science, scientific process includes the experience from proposing the question to solving it. During the process, each step contains the essential factors of science process skills. Only by going deep into science process skills, could inquiry teaching gain the actual effect. The author proposed the basic essential factors of science process skills of chemistry curriculum based on the overall analysis of the scientific inquiry process. These factors include defining problem, observing, taking record, searching materials, formulating hypotheses, controlling variables, experimenting, comparing, classifying, building models, interpreting data, expressing, exchanging ideas, reconsidering, evaluating and so on. Each science process skill is divided into four grades in chemistry curriculum goal, corresponding to the various grades of students.The science process skill falls into the procedural knowledge. It is the high level intelligence skill. The learning of science process skills cannot be separated from the learning of descriptive knowledge. The process of learning science process skills is tied to the process of learning scientific knowledge. The learning of science process skill can promote the learning of scientific knowledge, and vice verse. Science process skill includes implicit knowledge, which couldn't be expressed effectively by the language merely. However, it could be learned by the way of internalizing explicit knowledge and comprehending implicit knowledge. Therefore, both explicit learning and implicit learning are needed in the process of learning science process skills.Science process skills must be formed and enhanced in scientific inquiry activities. Due to this reason, in order to train students' science process skills, scientific inquiry activities must be emphasized in the chemistry textbooks. Science process skills in chemistry textbooks could be presented in certain ways, such as establishing the specific subject or unit of science process skills by taking scientific inquiry learning as main stream in whole, devising the column of activities, adopting dispenser arrangement and so on.Learning science process skills follows the principles of general skills training. Meanwhile, it has own characteristics. Through theoretical discussion and action research on the actual implementation, the author proposed the effective way of fostering students' science process skills, which is to combines science process skills with scientific knowledge organically in chemistry instruction. Specifically, first of all, display the knowledge of classroom teaching. Second, analyze possible activities of teaching. Third, analyze the essential factors of science process skills in each teaching activity. Finally, integrate the teaching plan. These approaches show that chemistry knowledge and science process skill are coupled effectively in the teaching plan. After certain period of practice and research, teachers would have better understanding on the science process skills teaching methodology. They will pay more attention to effectiveness of teaching activities. The levels of students' science process skills would be enhanced.