The Measurement And Assessment Of High School Students' Spatial Ability In Chemistry

In Science,Technology,Engineering and Mathematics(STEM)domains,the students usually receive non-verbal information such as graphics,animation,video and so on,which is often more clear,intuitive and accurate than language in expressing and delivering complex conceptions.The students who have superior spatial abilities are able to generate and manipulate the mental representations of complex ideas,and show the innovative potential in the STEM domains in the future.For enhancing the basic and applied research of spatial ability,Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center(SILC)was founded as a National Science Foundation(NSF)funded Science of learning center.At the same time,the practice of chemical education also shows that students have great difficulties in solving chemical problems relating to spatial information.It is necessary to study the space ability in chemistry and its related measurement and assessment.In the introduction,the background of the research is firstly expounded,and the significance of this study is discoursed in detail from both theoretical and practical aspects.Then,in order to clarify the content and range of the research,spatial ability in chemistry,which is the key conception of the research,is clearly defined.On the basis of retrieving a large amount of English literatures,this paper makes a comprehensive review of the research on spatial ability in psychology and chemistry education.Finally,the research ideas,methods and innovations of this study are introduced.The first chapter reviews the theoretical basis of space ability in chemistry.Firstly,it is reviewed that how the conception of space in chemistry developed and evolved in the history of science,and it is pointed out that the research objects of spatial ability in chemistry are the microscopic problems of material structure.Secondly,two kinds of theories are introduced,which are the visualization theory in science education domains and the triple representations theory in chemistry education.It is pointed out that the spatial ability in chemistry is substantially a part of the microscopic representation ability.The second chapter is to construct the assessment standard of Chinese high school students'spatial ability in chemistry.First of all,the paper analyzes the related discourse of problems about spatial structure in the Chinese chemical curriculum standard of high school.And then,based on Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives,SOLO taxonomy,van Hiele levels of geometric thought and Piaget's and Inhelder's theory of Spatial Development,the assessment criteria of spatial ability in chemistry of high school students are proposed.It has 4 Levels,including students'behaviors,chemical knowledge,geometric and psychological factors.Finally,in order to test the scientific,rationality and feasibility of the assessment standard,4 kinds of experts are selected who are the chemistry educators in college,chemistry teachers in high school,instruction researchers and coaches of Chemistry Olympiad to carry out Delphi method research.The assessment standard is revised and optimized refered to the advice of experts.The third chapter is to develop an instrument to evaluate high school students' spatial ability in chemistry.Firstly,two kinds of education and psychological test theories are introduced which are the classical test theory and Rasch Model,and then guided by measurement framework,a measurement tool is developed which is to evelute high school students'spatial ability in chemistry.After two rounds of test,the quality of measurement tool is inspected,and it is improved and optimized in terms of the quantitative evidences obtained from the test.Finally,the results of inspection show that the measurement tool meet the requirements of large sample testing.The fourth chapter is the implementation of high school students'spatial ability in chemistry of the large sample test,and the analysis of the testing results.The testing data show that firstly the assessment standard of high students' spatial ability in chemistry which is constructed by the researcher is scientific and reasonable,secondly it is normal distribution of the high school students' spatial ability in chemistry,thirdly after training,there is no significant difference of the high school students' spatial ability in chemistry in different ages and genders,there is significant difference in different levels of academic achievements in a school and different hierarchical schools in recruitment.The fifth chapter is the conclusions and discussions of the study.First of all,the theoretical innovation of the research is to construct the evaluation standard of high school students'spatial ability in chemistry,secondly,the high-quality measurement instrument of spatial ability in chemistry is develped based on the evaluation standard.In terms of the large sample test,this paper depicts the contribution of emp:irical research such as the normal distribution of high school students' spatial ability in chemistry.Based on it,the suggestions about the strategy are proposed relevant to the high school instruction and test development,Finally,after reflection,there are some limitations that the research objects are not abundent,research methods are few and the levels of quantitative research are not high in this study,which is the further research direction in the future.