The Science Inquiry Of Primaty And Secondary School Students And The Affect Factors

The argument for science inquiry as the core of science education has gained great emphasis in the field of science education reform. In the field of education, teaching, and psychology, researchers have paid great attention to student's science inquiry due to its theoretical and practical significance. In psychology, science inquiry was conducted under the labels"scientific reasoning"and"scientific thinking". There have been considerable researches investigating the psychological mechanism of science inquiry, especially the strategies of science inquiry and the affecting factors. However, there are still questions needing to be explored further. First, the previous research on science inquiry was mainly focused on the seperate stages of science inquiry. It's still unclear about the characteristics of the whole process of science inquiry. Second, the evaluation index of science inquiry ability is inconsistent. Third, there are only few studies exploring the development of science inquiry. Finally the studies on affecting factors were also inconsistent.This research first made theoretical analysis on the essence of science inquiry. We considered science inquiry as a problem-solving activity that uses the same information-processing mechanisms identified in other problem-solving contexts; The cognitive strategies are the core of inquiry; Science inquiry is an active knowledge construction activity; Individual epistemological belief of science, attitudes toward science, and reasoning ability play an important role in this process. Guided by those theories, the current research investigated the characteristics of science inquiry and the affecting factors, with students of grade 5, 6, 7 and 8 as the subjects.The experiment studies include two parts. In the first part, study 1 was designed to investigate the development of the science inquiry ability in the group of the primary and secondary School student, and how the task difficulty affects science inquiry. We used the self-directed, computer simulated inquiry task, namely pendulum and string task It required the subjects to find the factors that affected the swing frequency of the pendulum and the level of stretch of the string. To evaluate the ability of science inquiry, we analyzed subjects'experiment-design strategies, evidence-evaluation strategies, and results of inference. In the second part, also with the primary and secondary school student as subjects, Study 2 and study 3 were designed to investigate the structure and characteristics of epistemological-belief-of-science questionnaire and the attitudes-toward-science questionnaire respectively. Study 4, using the structural equation method, investigated further how the reasoning ability, the epistemological belief of science, and the attitudes toward science affected the science inquiry. The main findings were as follows:1. For the primary and secondary school students, there were five types of experiment design strategies : global design strategy, partially organized strategy, local chain strategy, focus on single variable level strategy, and no design strategy; there four types of evidence evaluation strategies: couples comparison strategy, covariation strategy, theory based strategy, and no evaluation strategy.2. There was no significant sex difference in correct inference, experiment design and evidence evaluation. But there were significant grade difference. The difference came from the comparison between the primary and secondary school students. But there was difference neither between grade 5 and grade 6 students nor between grade 7 and grade 8 students.3. Task difficulty influenced the process of experiment design and inference. The level of experiment design and the percentage of correct inference in three variables task were significantly lower than those in the two variables task. However, task difficulty did not inflence in the process of evidence evaluation. In addition, the number of correct exclusive inference was much smaller than that of inclusive inference ones. So we can come to the conclusion that it was more difficult for students to make exclusive inference than to make inclusive inference.4. The epistemological-belief-of-science questionnaire used in this research has high reliability and validity. It included three factors: source of knowledge, certainty of knowledge and development of knowledge. Those three factors could interpret well the psychological structure of epistemological belief of science. There were significant grade differences, but no sex differences in the epistemological belief of science. Overall, the higher the grade, the more positive the epistemological belief is.5. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the Attitudes toward Science Scale (ATSS) had high reliability and validity. The Attitudes toward Science Scale included four factors: attitudes toward science value, attitudes toward learning science, attitudes toward participating in science activities and inquiry, attitudes toward scientists and career related to science. There was significant grade difference in ATSS due to the fact that lower–grade students have more positive attitude than the higher-grade students. Sex difference was only found in attitudes toward learning science and attitudes toward scientists and career related to science. The boy's score was much higher than the girl's.6. Epistemological belief of science, attitudes toward science and reasoning ability significantly affected science inquiry. Attitudes toward science partly mediated the relations between epistemological belief and inquiry ability. Epistemological belief of science affected science inquiry steadily inrespective of task difficulty or grade; however, the effect of reasoning ability on science inquiry was larger for the difficult three-variable task than for the easy two-variable task.The implications of the results to science education and teaching are that the science inquiry strategy is important content in science education, and should be paid great importance. Building positive epistemological belief of science and attitudes are also crucial.