Comparison And Research On Chemistry Curricula Of The Mainland, Hong Kong And Taiwan In Senior Middle School

On the threshold of the 21st century, chemical education in senior high school on mainland was undertaking a revolution with the changes taking place at home and broad. Facing the defects of the old curriculum, it was advisable to compare the curricula of other regions and learn their experiences so that we could accelerate our reform and make it widely accepted. In fact, existing researches on international chemistry courses were mostly of Europe and America. Little had been done about Hong Kong and Taiwan, not mention comparative educational researches among chemistry courses of the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. So it was valuable to carry out this kind of researches.In this paper, history of chemistry curriculum reform in three regions was introduced. Then the curriculum standards and textbooks of chemical curriculum were analyzed and compared in the fields of their curriculum setting, objectives, contents and implementation. After each section, there were further discussion in the perspective of world curriculum trends.The conclusions showed that current chemical curriculum of senior high school on mainland reflects some international ideals about curriculum setting, objectives, contents and textbook design. That was to make diverse curricula aiming at developing students' personalities, to set up objective systems according to the scientific literacy required for students and to choose instructive materials and to design inquiry activities for the purpose of helping students learn how to live and study in their life time. However, there were also some deficiencies in terms of implementation of curriculum objectives, emphasis on objectives about attitudes and values and requirement for specific knowledge in the standards, etc.Although chemistry curriculum of senior high school on mainland had achieved substantially, further adjustment was still needed. For example, to organize chemistry curricula for different grades properly, to deal with the relationship of required and optional curricula and of knowledge objectives, ability objectives and attitude objectives and to make content standards more suitable as guidance of textbook design and teaching.