| Centering round core concepts to organize education content on subject is one question which attracts learners on science education recently. From the publishing of Principles and Big Ideas of Science Education, to the "Less is More"put forward by America learners, also to the written in the next science curriculum standard, all of these embody core concepts attracting many people. Core concepts are the knowledge which can organize many other concepts and principles within subject. However, enhancing core concepts only is not enough, because core concepts contain merely several ideas and they are highly generalized.It’s necessary to study concrete content before learn abstract substance, so grasping core concepts need many important concepts support to help student generally master core concepts finally. These concepts concrete concepts are important concepts. So choosing important concepts as learning materials for students is a worth studying problem. Having made clear the status of core concepts in curriculum design, how to choose core concepts becomes the first question we plan to study in this article. As motion and interaction is an important topic in physic, we choose important concepts in this topic as study object.After selecting important concepts, we need a reasonable sequence arrangement of important concepts. The research on learning sequence of important concepts is learning progression study, which is the second issue of concern in this article.According to the current literature, the understanding of current scholars on learning progression can be roughly divided into two categories. Some scholars believe that the concept of learning progression is learning sequence, in accordance with the rules of logic and the development of students; while others think learning progression is the psychological process of the students’ understanding of scientific concepts. There is no conflict between these two kinds of understanding.They are two kinds of view on teaching problem:curriculum theory and instruction theory. But the learning progression unit is large from the curriculum theory view, and from the perspective of instruction theory learning progression unit is relatively small. Based on the subjective and objective conditions of our research, we take the first view.Centering round the two questions, this article contains four studies:The first study:choosing important concepts. Firstly use the method of comparison study to choose important concepts. We choose curriculum documents from 44 countries and regions to do the comparative study.After literature review, we finally obtained frequency statistic map of these 36 concepts, then choose concepts which frequency appears more than 10 times as an important concepts.After doing preliminary screening of the important concept, we produced 7 level Likert scale. Physics teachers in the middle school from a number of provinces and cities of China were investigated, in order to understand the teachers’ degree of recognition of the important concepts we screen. Then, by a statistical analysis of the results of data, we found that most important concepts received the middle school teacher’s approval. While only a concept needs to be adjusted. This concept is omited. Finally, we selected 20 concepts as an important concepts in theme of "movement and interaction" in middle school physics.The second study:constructing a learning progression hypothesis. Having made clear our problems, the following task is to construct learning sequence of the important concepts. Construction of learning progression hypothesis is the first step, and this is the second research. The assumption is not arbitrary, but need to refer to the existing literature.In this paper, based on previous research results of physical teaching and the current domestic and international physics textbook, we construct a learning progression hypothesis of the important concepts in the theme "movement and interaction under the theme".This learning progression hypothesis consists of three stages:the stage of junior middle school, the low grade in high school stage and high grade in high school stage.The third study:developing measurement tools. Having learning progression assumption, the next step is to verify it. Verifing learning progression hypothesis needs to understand students’ learning situation. And to understand students’ learning situation, the key need is objective and reliable measurement tool to measure development of students’ learning. This is the content of study three. Corresponding to the previous learning hypothesis, respectively according to the important concept of the junior middle school stage, the low grade in high school stage and high grade in high school stage, we developed three sets of measuring tools, for learning progression assumptions verified and revised.Here, we use Rasch model from the current popular methods. The specific development process is divided into the following steps:1th) define a property and structure of linear concept definition; 2nd) define behavior of subjects; 3rd)compilation of original test library and scoring rules for the target population; 4th) representative samples for field testing; 5th)running Rasch model, evaluation of reliability and validity indicators of topic, and change the subject when necessary; 6th) repeat fourth and fifth steps until all the questions are in line with the requirements of the Rasch model; 7th)the validity and reliability of statement construct questionnaire. According to these steps, we developed three sets of measuring tool.The forth study:verifying learning progression hypothesis. After obtained the suitable measurement tools, we tested students from grade nine, and grade one and grade two in senior high school. After the results of the tests, we use Rasch model to make equivalent treatment on the result of measure of three copies of measuring tools, to make the measuring results can be put on a scale of comparison.Finally we get the difficulty value list of important concepts of "movement and interaction" theme in middle school. Based on each difficulty value of important concepts, the next step is to verify and revise learning progression hypothesis established.The principle to verify and revise learning progression hypothesis is: respecting the logical sequence of physics itself is a prerequisite for designing learning progression. In this context, if difficult sequence of some important concepts is inappropriate, first of all the logic can tolerate and then we can make appropriate adjustments.The course of verifying and revising learning progression hypothesis is:First of all, from the advanced framework of view, the average difficulty of junior high school knowledge is -1.1835, the average difficulty of low grade in high school is -0.0673, average difficulty of high grade in high school is 1.864. The three stages of the steps of the gap is very obvious, so the division of three stages of junior high school, low grade in high school and high grade in high school gets verified. Next we discuss the sequence of important concepts in each stage. Due to the mass of concepts, according to the logical relationship between the concepts we firstly classified similar concepts as a class, thus summed up some groups of concepts. So you can first find the order of concept groups, and then determine the order of concepts contained in the concept groups, finally we can get a reasonable learning progression. For example, we classified important concepts of junior middle school into four concept groups, after discussing their order is:speed, force, pressure, Newton’s law. After discussing the order of each concept in cocept groups, we concluded that the sequence of important concepts in junior middle school stage is:speed, force, gravity, friction, forces influence mutually, synthesis of two force in same line, pressure, pressure in liquid, Newton’s first law and the second law of Newton. In the same way we have come to the learning sequence of concepts in low grade in high school, which is:uniform variable rectilinear motion and vector, elastic, buoyancy, frictional force, Newton’s first law, Newton’s second law, Newton’s third law, the synthesis and decomposition of force. Finally, we get the sequence of important concepts in high grade in high school:the horizontal projectile motion, circular motion, the centripetal force, gravitation.In this way, we established the learning sequence of concepts in movement and interaction, namely learning progression.In summary this article reached the following conclusions:the important concept in "movement and interaction under the theme" in middle school is a total of 20; get the difficulty value in "important concept in motion and interaction"; established the learning progression in "movement and the interaction".Curriculum design needs to consider social needs, subject logic, students’ development as well as the history of traditional factors. In the perspective of student development and subject logic,we exame the difficulty of important concepts and study subject logic, construct a "movement and interaction" learning progression, as to privide reference to curriculum standard revision and textbook compilation. |
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