An Investigation On The Grade-8 Students' Ability Of Designing Experiment

In the course of scientific inquiry, whether conjecture and hypothesis are true or not can only be tested through experiment ; experiments are also important foudations for other posterior taches such as evidence collection,inspection and evaluation,expression and communication.Whether a scientific inquiry activity can be accomplished or not is directly affected by the tache of designing experiment .Research shows that designing experiment is the central tache of experiment problem-solving process.However,the investigation on students'scientific inquiry ability indicates that the ability of constituting an inquiry plan which is equal to design experiment is a weak line in the Middle School students'inquiry ability .This study,which based on well-designed experiment designing problems,by the way of questionnaire survey associated with clinic talking,deeply understand and analysis the current Middle School students'ability of experiment designing and how students think about experiment,and try to be some research foudation for better test questions exploiture and evaluation of students'ability of experiment designing in posterior related Research problems.This study chooses the Grade-8 students as participations and mostly probing into the following questions:the distributing situation of Grade-8 students'ability of designing experiment;how do they think during the process of designing experiment ;how do they think about the others'experiments.The problem situation in the questionaire are all closely related with students daily lives.Investigation research shows:(1)A little more than half of Grade-8 students have gain definite ability of designing reasonable experiment ,but there is some gap with stated level; a little less than half of them haven't gain definite ability of designing reasonable experiment .Some students educe conlusion directly,other ones can't control pertinent variables, the others can't design experiment and there is a big gap with stated level.(2)The difficulties that Grade-8 students facing in the assignment of designing experiment conclude the following ones:lack of effective contaction between daily lives or studying experiences and the problems to be dealed with;"proving"tendency without dialectic thinking,and thinking habit which neglects the opposite angle;lack of foreseeing consciousness about the results of experiments ,have a low experimental thinking level;lack of experiment designing experiences;lack of experimental problem-solving prototypes;lack of basic procedural knowledge and strategetic knowledge;lack of ability of evaluating experiment .