Research On The Chemistry Curriculum Content System And Learning Progressions Of The Big Ideas Of Matter In Middle School

With the increasing importance of talent as a strategic resource for promoting economic and social development,adhering to the strategy of invigorating China through the development of science and education and the strategy of reinvigorating China through human resource development,running school education well has new historical significance.Curriculum reform is a key link in school education reform and improving the quality of talent cultivation.The Ministry of Education successively issued the General High School Curriculum Plan(2017Edition,2020 Revision)and the Compulsory Education Curriculum Plan(2022 Edition),emphasizing the promotion of new curriculum reform through curriculum for cultivating people and emphasizing the construction of a discipline curriculum content system led by big ideas.How to construct the discipline curriculum content system dominated by big ideas has become an urgent problem for curriculum developers in China.Chemistry curriculum standards attach great importance to organizing course content around the composition,structure,properties,and transformation of matter.Matter is an important big idea that governs the content of chemistry curriculum.The construction of a middle school chemistry curriculum content system guided by the big ideas of matter helps students gradually achieve structured knowledge correlation,cognitive thinking,and view of matter.However,current curriculum researchers have not yet found a feasible implementation path around how to integrated construct the chemistry curriculum content system of the big ideas of matter(CCCSM)in middle school.In response to this challenge,this study mainly focuses on addressing two core research questions: Based on the view of integrated design,which CCCS are dominated by the big ideas of matter in middle school? How is the distribution of the CCCSM at different stages to reflect continuity and development?Focusing on the first research question,Chapter 3 defined the "big ideas of matter".Chapter 4,guided by the linguistic theory,selected chemistry(science)curriculum standard texts from the United States,Canada,Australia,the United Kingdom,and Singapore as data sources.It is believed that these curriculum standards all contain a set of discrete themes related to the big ideas of matter that have not been explicitly stated.Using the LDA topic model to analyze the preprocessed text,it was found that the big ideas of matter dominate 12 topics.To explore the internal connections between these topics,a comparative analysis was conducted between this result and the clustering results obtained based on semantic network analysis.It was found that12 topics belong to four different dimensions and intersection dimensions: chemical reaction,structure,property,and interaction.Considering that the results of text analysis were only based on computer output data and lack thinking in education and teaching,the study finally constructed a multi-dimensional and multi-level CCCSM,considering the three substructures of disciplines,teaching,and philosophy,under the guidance of Schwab’s curriculum structure theory.Around the second research question,this study mainly carried out three works.Firstly,Chapter 5 clarified the concept groups that supports the achievement of the 12 topics from curriculum perspective;Identified the key questions that need to be answered for each topic from teaching perspective;Analyzed the understanding level of middle school students under various topics from cognitive perspective.Finally,guided by conceptions learning theory and learning progressions(LPs),the study emphasized the development and connectivity of concepts,constructed a multi-dimensional LP of the CCCSM at the theoretical level,and characterized the distribution of curriculum content in different stages.Secondly,in order to validate the hypothetical LP constructed in Chapter 5,in Chapter 6,an assessment tool for LP of the CCCSM was developed based on knowledge transfer theory,which included 29 items.This tool is used to evaluate the understanding of the CCCSM.After conducting the pilot test,initial test and retest on students in the junior high school,senior high school compulsory and selective compulsory stages,the data results based on Rasch measurement and factor analysis confirmed the good reliability and validity of the assessment tool.Finally,in Chapter 7,based on the Rasch measurement analysis of 806 students’ actual test results,the hypothetical LP constructed in Chapter 5 was revised in terms of level quantity and position.In addition,Bayesian network was used to modify the learning stage of the LP,and finally,a panoramic view of the LP of the CCCSM,which has been tested through practice,was depicted at different learning stages.In Chapter 8,compared the CCCSM with the Chinese chemistry curriculum standards,it found that Chinese chemistry curriculum standards attach varying degrees of importance to the12 topics.Suggestions were proposed from three aspects: matter-particle relationship,structure-property relationship and chemical reaction.Based on the analysis of students’ performance on various topics,it was found that there may be problems in the integrated design of chemistry textbooks in different stages and disciplines.The research findings of this chapter provided valuable experience for the subsequent construction of chemistry curriculum.The innovation points of this study can be summarized as follows:1.This study constructed a CCCSM and panoramic view of the LP of the CCCSM.It outlined the course content that middle school students need to learn at different learning stages,and strengthened the horizontal connection between different topics.Compared with the current curriculum standards and textbooks in China,the research findings have important value for the reform of chemistry curriculum in China at the practical level.2.This study adopted a triangulation approach to demonstrate the validity of the research conclusions.When constructing the CCCSM,the LDA topic model and semantic network analysis method were used to obtain 12 topics and their corresponding topic dimensions.Qualitative research methods were also used to modify them.The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods improved the validity of the constructed CCCSM.To validate the LP of CCCSM,researchers used Rasch model and Bayesian network on the collected data.The complementarity of the two methods improved the scientificity and accuracy of the research results.