Investigation & Research On The K-12 IT Education In Part Of Hubei Province

Now IT education has been the drive of literacy education in our country and the focus of the new innovation of primary education. It plays important role in improving the young people's information literacy and cultivating the people who can adapt to the informationized society. However, IT course is a new course after all, and it is in an experimental period. Therefore, there are some problems in the understanding of IT education, the teaching ways of IT course, its teaching materials' compiling and its instructional evaluation, etc. According to such a situation, we did a whole and deep investigation on the circumstance of K-12 IT course in Hubei Province. We had gone to 13 primary and middle schools in 6 various cities in Hubei Province in October 2002, and did questionnaire investigation, visited schools and listened to lessons, etc. This investigation is very valuable and meaningful, which not only makes us know more clearly about the problems existed in the practice of present K-12 IT education and find the factors that lead to the problems, but also offers some references, suggestions on the innovation of IT education and the emending of relative policies in this primary education reform.This thesis pointed out some main problems existed in K-12 IT education based on a great deal of materials collected in this investigation, analysed the causes of these problems and proposed the ways to resolve them. At first, it expounded people's wrong understandings on the concept, object and content of IT education. And pointed out that they were the origin of other problems. Besides, it emphasized that K-12 IT education is not only computer education, but aimed at cultivating students' information literacy. And it proposed the 5 characteristics of the teaching of IT course, which are researchful, integrated, exoteric, practical and timely.Furthermore, we analysed detailedly the circumstance of the teaching, evaluation and teaching materials of IT course, and found the problems and the causes of them. We put forward the problem-solving projects under the guidance of the object and content of IT education, and analysed the policy and document of the primary education reform in our country. We also proposed that the application of "research-oriented learning" into IT education, and suggested its ideas' application into the systematic reform of the teaching, evaluation and teaching materials. At last, we sumed up other problems found in this investigation, such as how to use modern instructional media resource, how to teach according to different learners, how to link up IT courses in different studying periods, how to improve the teachers' standard, how to solve the imbalance of various areas. Finally, we proposed a problem-solving project combining with the experiences of some schools.