The Innovative Research Of Geography Assignments For Senior Middle School Under The New Curriculum Standards

Geography assignment is an indispensable part of geography education. It plays a significant role in consolidating the knowledge of geography, developing the geographical way of thinking and cultivating an emotion for geography. As the geography curriculum development imposes new requirements on geography assignment, it is necessary to attach more and deeper significance to the later. Therefore, a scientific design of geography assignment is essential to accelerate curriculum development on geography education. This paper, by reconsidering homework arrangements, the contents and value pursued under the mentality of new curriculum, aims to provide beneficial and scientific references for senior high school assignment design in geography education.This paper draws on many domestic and international researches about the theory of assignment, refers to the latest achievements on assignment research, explores the nature of assignment and gets enlightenments from the general theoretical study of the law about geography assignment. It thus conducts a detailed study on the theoretical basis for the design of geography assignment, with the expectation of finding the educational psychology as the theoretical basis for a scientific design of geography assignment. This research, based on surveys and interviews of the implementation of high school geography assignment under the new curriculum standards, by selecting a considerable amount of secondary schools in Zhejiang Province, with the method of questionnaire, carries out a much comprehensive investigation of geography assignments in using Hunan Education Publishing House Edition textbooks and combs out the gap between geography assignments and the new geography curriculum reform. With all the prerequisites above, the concept of geography assignments is redefined, and is endowed with more functions. And the new functions are: function of constructing the geographical knowledge, function of cultivating geographical thinking, functions of feedback and communication, function of developing a wide range of intelligence, function of cultivating students' individuality as well as students' interest in learning. On this basis, it proposes eight principles of geographical assignments design, and they are systematic, interest-stimulating, and capability-relying, geography-oriented, open, practical and typical. With the above studies in mind, I put forward in this paper some proposals for reform of geography assignments, point out the direction for geography assignment development and advocate that, in order to adapt to the new curriculum, geography assignment have to encounter the following five changes: from dictatorship to dialogue, from closure to opening, from uniform to personality, from unitary to diversity, from books to life. This paper conducts a series of detailed researches on new geographic assignment system according to Hunan Education Publishing House Edition textbook, and puts forward some proposals concerning requirements for geography teachers. As to assessment for assignments, formative evaluation, as well as portfolio evaluation is proposed. Finally, the various types of geography assignment are studied, which provides a reasonable reference for geography teachers.