An Experimental Study On Promoting Students’ Learning Autonomy By Reflective Learning In Junior Middle School

A new round of curriculum reform has brought profound changes in the way students learn.Reflective learning is a new way of learning due to curriculum reform,and reflection is an important part of learners’ progress.Although in our country,most research is aimed at teachers’ reflective learning,ignored the students is the subject of learning.How to improve the students’ learning ability is the ultimate goal of our study.In view of the above situation,some scholars combine reflection with autonomous learning,which is called reflective autonomous learning.There are few studies in this field in China.The main research objects are senior high school students,and some college students with autonomous learning ability,good learning habits and learning ability.In the process of education,teachers should pay attention to cultivating students’ autonomous learning ability.According to the research,the importance of education in remote poverty-stricken areas is generally relatively low,so the author chooses junior high school students as the research object.The purpose of this experiment is to improve junior middle school students’ ability of English autonomous learning through the use of the reflective learning strategies.The research subjects are 100 junior middle school students of Grade Eight from the middle school of Mengcun.They are from two parallel classes,Class One Grade Eight is called the control class,Class Two Grade Eight is called the experimental class.The whole experiment lasted for 12 weeks.Reflective learning strategies are applied to the experimental class while the control class is on normal learning.In this experiment,various research methods are used such as: test,questionnaires,interview,reflective diary and others.Before and after the experiment,test and questionnaires are given to all the subjects,the data collected are analyzed with SPSS 13.0.In addition,the student is required to write reflective leaning diaries in the experimental classes,which aims to observe the change of students’ autonomous learning consciousness.After the experiments the teacher interviewed 40 students from two classes to deeply investigate their learning attitudes and emotional changes.Both the qualitative data and quantitative data collected after the experiment lead to the conclusion that reflective learning can improve junior middle school students’ autonomous learning ability.There are no obvious differences between the test results of the two classes before the experiment.After that the student’s grades have significantly improved more in the experimental class than in control class.The data of the questionnaires before and after the experiments also shows that students’ interests and autonomous learning awareness developed rapidly in the experimental class.During the interview,the students themselves also mentioned that the training of reflective learning methods enhanced their ability of supervision and control their awareness of the learning process.The diaries show that students’ ability of reflection and self-regulation are improved.