The Study Of Enhancing Scientific Literacy Of Prospective Chemistry Teachers And Promoting STS Education

STS education is said to be the most useful teaching method in current science education and it's one of the important tendency of science education reform. However, because some undesirable aspects of the traditional curriculum arrangement in higher teacher education, the prospective teachers don't have adequate scientific literacy and ability to implement STS education in high schools.In this paper, the efforts are made in the discussion on the rise of STS education and the strategic importance of STS education and the analysis of international teacher-training development. In combination with the present status of the scientific literacy and ability of high school teachers, this paper discusses the feasibility to improve the scientific literacy of prospective teachers and enhance their ability to carry out STS education by offering elective course on the topic of STS. It suggests possible means to integrate STS education into present curriculum arrangement in higher teacher education and comes to the conclusion that integrating STS education into present higher teacher education is an important means of pre-service training for high school STS teachers.On the basis of theoretical research, we conduct the exploratory application study. The education experiment is tried in seniors of chemistry major through STS elective course. We translate the items of VOSTS, which is widely used to survey students' views on science-technology-society overseas and modify them so that they are suitable for Chinese students. The analysis of experimental data shows that STS course has remarkable effect on prospective teachers' scientific literacy, understanding of STS ideas and ability to carry out STS education.Further, we design and compile the teaching materials applicable to STS education of chemistry majors, and establish our own unique teaching mode. We believe they are worth improving and popularizing.