An Empirical Research On Scientific Thinking Cultivation Under Dewey’s Educational Philosophy

With the deepening of the quality education reform, innovations on the teaching goals and teaching methods have been constantly carried out and updated. However, the current situation of quality education is that the evaluation of students still does not really break the shackles of putting too much emphasis on academic scores and has not changed the traditional teaching method of repeating what the book says. This phenomenon can hardly meet the requirements of the new era’s educational reform and has developed into a serious impediment to the further development of quality education. Therefore, changing the educational goals and exploring new teaching methods are more and more important for the needs of both students and the reform itself.This paper relies on the national program (2011-2014) of professor Gan of Northwest University-"the Cultivation of Scientific Thinking Skills in Quality Education and the Construction of Experiment School in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region". Lasting for three years from September of2011to May of2014, this project is supported with400,000esearch funds from state Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education of Ningxia Autonomous Region. With the help of local officials, the project selected Tongxin Yixiao as the experimental school, Class One in Grade Four and Class Two in Grade Four as two experimental classes, which have150students in total. The project, aiming at encouraging innovation, promoting humanistic quality among the educatees, is committed to effectively improve the scientific thinking ability of the students in this area, from both the perspectives of humanities and natural science.As one of the core participants of my tutor’s program, the author of this thesis puts the main focus on the parts related to thinking ability training of the students during the process of participating in the project. With a series of researches on literatures related to this field, the author of this thesis puts forward the idea of applying John Dewey’s practical educational theory into the design and implementation of thinking ability cultivation, intending to explore a more efficient and viable mode for thinking development courses. As the core idea of Dewey’s educational theory is "Education is growth", with a refining summary of this idea, the author intends to synthetically apply cooperative learning, situational teaching and "learning by doing" theories into thinking ability courses. The research mainly focuses on testing the effect of this combining mode on improving students’ innovative thinking skills, critical thinking skills, empathy skills, imaginative thinking skills and logical thinking abilities.The jobs accomplished in this thesis are as follows:(1) With previous studies on the problems of current educational reform, this paper discusses the aims and significance of seeking new teaching mode for scientific thinking cultivation in the framework of quality-oriented education under John Dewey’s (1859-1952) pragmatic theory of education.(2) With studies on the literatures of related field, the author has put up with the concrete goals for thinking ability cultivation. Guided with the existing researches, the author summarizes three methods to be applied:situational teaching,"learning by doing" as well as cooperative learning. An empirical research is designed to test the effect of the integration of the three methods in thinking ability training.(3) On the basis of theoretical studies, this thesis provides descriptions of the empirical research that situational teaching,"learning by doing" as well as cooperative learning are synthetically applied into thinking ability classes for10weeks in the former chosen experimental school. The author presents examples on the detailed teaching contents, methods and cases applied, in thinking cultivating classes; meanwhile, observations on the change of student’s thinking level are recorded and collected.(4) According to the recordings of experimental classes’ performance, this thesis analyzes both with qualitative and quantitative methods to verify the effectiveness of situational teaching,"learning by doing" and cooperative learning into thinking ability teaching. With deep observing, detailed recording and efficient summary, a new mode of thinking ability training including the course content, the teaching methodology and the proper role of the educators are explored. The later stage of the research is a fact-check process in the teaching of college English writing class for Non-English Majors, providing a reference for future researches in this field.This essay consists of five parts:the introduction, literature review, the implementation and evaluation of experimental curriculum, the fact-check process in college writing courses and the final summary and additional recommendations.