Research On The New Model Of The Scientific Inquiry Teaching In The Middle School

Since the beginning of this century, China has undergone a new round of curriculum reform. Over the past ten years there has been dynamic changes in the junior and senior school curriculum reform. The key idea of the curriculum reform is to improve students' scientific literacy, to carry out scientific inquiry teaching as a breakthrough point especially in the laboratory-based curriculum, such as physics, chemistry and biology, scientific inquiry teaching is one of the highlights. Many teachers actively pursue and try scientific inquiry teaching related to the subject knowledge they teach. According to the different content of disciplines, some more mature scientific inquiry teaching models have been constructed, and some results have been achieved. As a result students' scientific literacy has been improved to certain extent. However, in the middle school science teaching practice, the situation of scientific inquiry teaching is not optimistic. There are still many problems and alienation. For example, some teachers have not grasped the essence of scientific inquiry teaching. They misunderstand scientific inquiry teaching and hold the wrong opinion that scientific inquiry teaching is just that teachers'demonstration experiments are replaced by students'hands-on laboratory experiments. Some scientific inquiry teaching practice lacks teachers' guidance. Some teachers give students too much freedom, the so-called "sheep phenomenon". To some teachers scientific inquiry teaching is equal to the scientists' research, they advocate pure science experiments, and painstakingly pursue correctness and efficiency. Therefore, science teaching is confined to a small framework, and all the students learn science like scientists, which is far away from the essence in the scientific inquiry teaching. Some teachers seldom apply scientific inquiry teaching in their classroom teaching. Instead, they only teach scientific method, and let students recite the main steps of scientific inquiry, which gradually leads to the tendency of discrepancy and inflexibility. The above phenomena may be caused by the following facts:the experimental materials, instruments and equipments are not adequate in middle school; the class size is too large; teachers are lack of training and assessment models are limited. However these are basically external influencing factors. The internal influencing factors are science teachers'cognitive limitations, lack of deep understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry. Now scientific inquiry teaching is still not widespread in middle school, and there still exist discrepancy and mechanization. The deep reason that can not be ignored is that teachers poorly understand the nature of scientific inquiry due to lack of the reflection on scientific epistemology and philosophy of science.This research analyzes scientific inquiry teaching in the sight of philosophy of science, especially from Popper's philosophy of science. There is not a single "nature of science" that fully describes all scientific knowledge and enterprises—various representations of NOS have been affirmed by historians, philosophers of science, science educators, and others. We acknowledge, of course, that there is considerable disagreement regarding certain issues on the NOS among people interested in the philosophy of science, and there is a lack of complete agreement regarding what science is and how it works, but we maintain that significant consensus exists regarding fundamental issues in the nature of science relevant to science education, the aspects of the scientific enterprise that fall under this level of generality...are that scientific knowledge is tentative (subject to change); empirically based (based on and/or derived from observation of the natural world; subjective (theory-laden); partly the product of human inference, imagination, and creativity (involves the invention of explanation); and socially and culturally embedded. Two additional important aspects are the distinction between observation and inferences, and the functions of, and relationships between scientific theories and laws. This study examines the level of View of NOS toward some teachers and students. Through the statistical analysis toward the questionnaire we found that most of the teachers'and students'knowledge about the nature of NOS is not rich except that their knowledge about the nature of imagination and creativity of science. The significance of this study lies in its interactive approach to explore in-service teachers'beliefs about the nature of science. These teachers'views of the NOS were found to influence laboratory instruction in the classroom.From this study we conclude that the central role of teachers'epistemological commitments must be addressed in pre-service and in-service teacher education program if we want to encourage more advantageous classroom practices.In addition, according to Popper's 4-step philosophy of science theory, a scientific inquiry teaching developing model is developed, which is compared with the original model. At the same time, the writer consults experts'opinions and they give a favorable comment. In order to examine the effective pedagogical practices, this model has been tested and described by some science teachers.There are five sections in this dissertation. The first part describes implication and the trace of evolution about scientific inquiry teaching. First, the paper involves the connotation of several related key concepts; Second, it shows the theory of scientific inquiry teaching; Third, it includes the process of the development of scientific inquiry: which has undergone a long process from initial proposal and propagation to establishment and rapid development. Science education is introduced to the primary and secondary school curriculum, and the scientific inquiry teaching is applied in science education reform in USA. It also introduces the reform process of science curriculum and the development of scientific inquiry teaching in China.The second section introduces the meanings and the function of scientific inquiry and talks about its'score elements. Firstly it introduces the meanings associated with 'inquiry'; secondly it elaborates its'function to improve students'science literacy; finally its'score elements are discussed.The third section introduces the present situation about the scientific inquiry teaching in China. First we have investigated some science teachers and students about the views of NOS; second we gather statistics and analyze about the survey; last it expounds the present situation about science education in our country.The fourth section elaborates the construction of a new model and preliminary comparison. The new scientific inquiry teaching model is constructed according to Popper's 4-step theory, primary compared the new model with the original one; and some related experts are consulted concerning their opinions about the prospect of the new model. This new model has been tested by some science teachers in teaching practice.The fifth section provides some conclusions, deficiency and prospect:Including some conclusions and shortcomings of this research, and problems which will be studied in the future.