Cultivating The Biology Experimental Teaching Abilities Of Undergraduates In Normal University Under The Background Of Curriculum Reform

In the last five years, with the profound education reform in elementary and middle schools in China, the Ministry of Education and the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission enacted the National Biology Curriculum Standards and the Life Science Curriculum Standards in Middle Schools, taking the education for all-around development as the core concept. The new biology curriculum takes these standards as a symbol and brings forward more demands for biology teachers, especially in experimental teaching. Facing the challenges such as the experimental quantity increases, synthesis types, the content and technology renewal, the teachers' abilities capacity to teach experimentally, has become one of the key factors determining the effectiveness of the biology curriculum reform in middle schools. Consequently, how to train the biology majors as teachers with abilities following the new biology curriculum has become a realistic problem in nonnal universities.Taking the teachers' experimental teaching abilities in biology as our subject, we explored the approaches of cultivating and improving the teachers' competence, both in theory and practice, by referring to literatures, doing investigations and interviews and doing practical research. Massive literatures about teacher education were sorted and analyzed; 95 biology teachers in middle schools from 15 different provinces or municipalities; 12 professors and 236 biology majors from 11 normal universities, were investigated through questionnaires; 12 middle school teachers and 6 professors were interviewed. From March to May in 2005, we carried out 54-class-hours courses of biology experiment teaching practice among 120 biology majors from three classes in East China Normal University. In addition, we investigated and interviewed the pre-service teachers and their mentor teachers during the teaching practice.The study concluded that: both the experimental teaching concepts and abilities of middle school teachers and normal university students are below the requirement of the new curriculum; the ways of cultivating these abilities are almost completely lacking; it can significantly improve the experimental abilities of normal students by taking part in the experimental teaching curriculum, through the situated teaching, action research, inquiry learning and cooperative learning approaches.The research suggested that: the normal universities should renew the concepts of normal education, take a clear role in teacher education in the context of the new curriculum reform, and focus on the professional development of normal students...