Action Research And Investigation On Current Situation About Model-Teaching Of High School Biology

The understanding on "the process of scientific research and the scientific methods" is one of the indicators of scientific literacy. Model and modelling has been widely used in modern natural and social sciences. There are a lot of models in biology curriculum studied by the high school students in our country, so it is able to enhance students'understandings of models and modelling, develop their abilities to conduct inquiry using models and modelling to take full advantage of this resource. However, the attention paid to modelling in the high school's biology teaching has not been enough, and the number of researches related to it is also relatively small. Therefore, the investigation and the action research on the current situation of model-based teaching in high school biology teaching is of practical significance and theoretical value.The whole study can be divided into three parts:the first part is the theoretical research which is mainly by referring to the literature to explore the domestic and foreign researches about the connotation,features, functions, construction and applications in teaching of models, and get a summary of the theories in pedagogy and educational psychology thereunder the model-based teaching,to construct the theoretical basis for this study; the second part is to find out the present status of the biological modeling-teaching in high school, here the author conducted a questionnaire-survey and the objects surveyed are representative and of broad source,they are:75 biology teachers in high school with different titles coming from the provinces and cities of Shandong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Shanghai; and 199 prospective biology teachers (including undergraduate and graduate students)from Beijing Normal University, East China Normal University, Shandong Normal University, Tianjin Normal University,and Shanghai Normal University; 584 high school students from Shanghai,Shandong, Zhejiang; in the third part, the author put the idea of modeling into practice using the method of action-research, cooperated by the 07th and 08 th students in Shanghai I & B Foreign Language School.During the two rounds of action-research the author attempted to solve the problems found in the questionnaire-survey, and then reflect to raise new questions in the process of problem-solving.The results are as follows:Firstly, there is no obvious differences about the cognition of scientific models among the objects; Secondly, the objects showed different extent of fancy on all kinds of models; Thirdly, the prospective biology teachers lack the ability of instructing the activities on model-constructing but the most of them have confidence on it; Fourthly, the male and female students in different kinds of high schools showed different extents of interest in biological learning and their habits of thinking have differences too; Fifthly,the action research on model-teaching has a positive effect on biological teaching; Lastly, the domestic research on model-teaching of biology in high school is not deep enough and the current situation of model-teaching of biology in high school is not satisfied,etc.In this study, recommendations are as follows:First, the domestic educators should pay attention to the model-teaching and the researches related to it; second,errors connected to the cognition of scientific models should be corrected through the pervasion of model-thinking in biology teaching; third, foreign teaching materials is needed to be referred to when we conduct the model-teaching; at the last, researches about model-teaching are of variety,teaching and the researches should be urged.