The Empirical Study Of Science Processing Ability Developing Process

As the times progresses and the society develops, the fundamental purpose of science education is no longer in cultivating talents for scientific research, but in improving scientific literacy of all citizens."Science Processing Ability" is the core element of the scientific literacy, it is an important ability to develop and get scientific literacy, and also it is the important content of education science. Although, the reform of evaluation system in China is gradually changing from "Knowledge oriented" to "ability oriented", due to the lagging of the establishment of science ability evaluation framework and evaluation instruments, the performance assessment which match with the "Science Processing Ability" still fails to implement to the real place. It is difficult for the traditional evaluation methods to promote the validity of evaluation and students’ability development. Based on the situation above, this study examined the current situation and trends of consistency studies in domestic and overseas, and introduced the concept of "Learning Process" to this "Science Processing Ability" study to construct the consistency among the evaluation, teaching and curriculum, to build the interaction and feedback system of these three issues, to improve the shortcoming of the current consistency research, to design the framework and practice map of students’"Science Processing Ability "process of development, and put it into teaching and evaluation practice. Through the empirical experience, interaction, feedback mechanism, we seek the win-win situation of consistency research and the development of students’"Science Processing Ability" Based on the ideas above, the core contents of this study and the primary problems to solve are as follows. What’s the meanning of the "Science Processing Ability"? What’s the component of the "Science Processing Ability"? What’s the developmental process of "Science Processing Ability"? How to develop teaching intervention based on the "Science Processing Ability"? How to develop performance test and evaluation based on "science progressing ability" developmental process? What’re the characteristics of "Science Processing Ability" developmental process? Concentrating on these problems, we carryed out the following study.Chapter1is the summary of the study. Firstly, described the background of this study, and also pointed out the purpose and significance of this study. Secondly, we discussed the theoretical basis of this study. And analysed the meaning of the basic conceptions of this study, such as, ability, knowledge, method and literacy, and described the interaction relationship among them. Based on this, we analysed the relevant conceptions, such as "science inquiry ability","science discipline ability", and clarified the classification method and research orientation of "science discipline ability", and then defined the essential connotation of "Science Processing Ability" in this study as follows,"the comprehensive ability with scientific discipline characteristic that cultivates in the process of constructing scientific knowledge, exploring scientific problems, its inner core is the science thinking, its dominant representation is science activities, it belongs to the category of the special abilities. Thirdly, we ensured the research perspectives and the focus problems in this study. That is focus on the performance assessment of the "Science Processing Ability" to reflect the characteristic of active, focus on the dynamic changes of the "Science Processing Ability" to reflect the characteristic of Developmental, through the establishment of the "Science Processing Ability" developmental processs to reflect the feature of empirical. Fourthly, based on these above, we proposed the technical route and basic method of this study.Chapter2is the construction of the framework of "Science Processing Ability". By the literature review, we determined the construction method of "Science Processing Ability" framework, that is Primary Trait Analysis (PTA) method, and used scientific activities and scientific contents as the supporter to construct the framework. Then, using the PTA method to study the elements of core competence in science curriculum standards of domestic and overseas, and studied the framework of three projects of major international science ability evaluation and its developmental trend. On the basis of literature research, we put forward depth-interviews of excellent science teachers and education researchers about the framework of "Science Processing Ability", eventually, we get four core elements of the "Science Processing Ability", that is "ability to put forward scientific problems","ability to design the process of exploration","ability to use materials and tools","ability to explain based on evidence", and then defined the connotation of these four core competence.Chapter3is the construction of the "Science Processing Ability" developmental process. We described and analyzed the content, elements and construction of the "Learning Process", and then deeply analyzed the ways "Learning Process" put into practice, there are cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies two ways. And according to the perspective of this study, we chose the longitudinal study as the research path. According to the level of students’ability and the perspective of this study, we builded the "Science Processing Ability" developmental process and defined the performance behavior of every ability level. This is the guidance framework of the following empirical studies.Chapter4is the design of the experimental study. From chapter4, it begins to enter the empirical part of this study, and the empirical part is the core part of this study, it is not only the process of experimental study, but also the practice exploration to carry out the "Science Processing Ability" performance assessment, it joins the preliminary theory construction, teaching and development of testing tasks together. According to the purpose of this research, we put forward the assumption of the experimental research, that is teaching intervention based "Science Processing Ability" developmental process (can be called for short as SPADP) can promote the development of the students’"Science Processing Ability", then we confirmed the independent variable, dependent variable and irrelevant variable of this experiment. According to the requirements of the research and the reality, we chose four classes of sixth grade in TMS middle school as the research subjects, and arranged the experimental groups and the control groups.Chapter5is about development and improvement of the evaluation instruments of "Science Processing Ability". According to the framework of "Science Processing Ability" developmental process, Wilson’s theory of "Four Building Blooks" and RASCH model, we developed students’"Science Processing Ability" assessment tasks, and conducted two trial tests, then used RASCH model to test the quality of this instruments, the results showed that the overall quality of the test instruments met the requirements of the RASCH model, after amendment of marks scale of some specific items, the test instruments can be appropriate for testing students’"Science Processing Ability". Afterwards, we gave some descriptions and explainations about the pretest instruments, items and its scoring criteria to illuminate the design intent of the test instruments.Chapter6is about the initial level of students’"Science Processing Ability" According to the results of the pretest, we analysed the initial level of every sub-layer "Science Processing Ability", compared the level of internal components of "Science Processing Ability", analyzed students’ability level of different classes, and had a qualitative analysis about the ability performance of some specific students from the micro perspective.Chapter7is about the teaching intervention based on the students’"Science Processing Ability" developmental process. We explored the issue about how performance assessment and "Science Processing Ability" developmental process promote science teaching. We put forwards the teaching intervention model based on students’"Science Processing Ability" developmental process (can be called for short as SPADP teaching model). We described the characteristic, structure, teaching intervention tools, selection of teaching contents of the SPADP teaching model, and described the process of teaching intervention by the way of case study. Chapter8is about the developmental level of the students’"Science Processing Ability". The results of the pretest and the posttest of "Science Processing Ability" demonstrated that students from four classes all had a promotion in "Science Processing Ability", and the results of the pretest and the posttest had a significant difference. The experimental groups had a bigger rise in SPA than the control groups. The posttest results of experimental groups and control groups had significant difference. In the control group, the improvement of ablity of advanced class students is is much smaller than regular class students. The boys had a better performance than girls in the whole and part of "Science Processing Ability". However, there was no significant difference between them. SPADP teaching intervention can effectively improve the "Science Processing Ability" of boys and girls equally. Besides describing the performance of overall and sub-layer of "Science Processing Ability", we analyzed the developmental characteristics of "SPA" from the micro perspective at the same time, and put forwards some possible reasons.Chapter9is the case study about students’"Science Processing Ability" developmental process. From the perspective of case study, we selected the typical case of the whole, and mainly used qualitative research methold to study. The pretest results of the case study found out that the knowledge that books carrying or teached by teachers are not always translated to students’ability. Student Y lacks of exploration practice in science. Student Y has not established conection between thinking and behavior consciously. Posttest results found out that student Y had a greater improvement in the abilities that only need low-level of thinking than that need high-level of thinking.Finally, we proposed the conclusion of this study, it clarified the conclusion, the enlightenment and the prospect of the research. Although, this study has made some valuable conclusion, but there is still a long way to go in the subsequent research, such as the refinement of "Science Processing Ability" framework and its long-term longitudinal studies, as well as construction of item bank of performance assessment etc.