Study Chemistry Teacher Disciplines Cognitive Structure Of The Development Level Of The Status Quo

Teachers' specialization has become an important international trend in their professional development. Teachers have to face new challenges because of the new curriculum reform. Chemistry teachers must stand on their own specialty set up the ideal of lifelong learning and optimize their cognitive structure. The cognitive structure of a chemistry teacher is the one stored in the teachers' mind, which includes structure of specialty knowledge and ability. Teachers'cognitive structure affect the teaching directly, for which it is necessary to explore chemistry teachers' cognitive structure. The research measured chemistry teachers'cognitive structures by using tree construction and word association.In this study we selected "atomic structure" as the research content.51 pre-service chemistry teachers 44 junior middle school chemistry teachers and 58 high school chemistry teachers responded to the inventory. The conclusion can be summarized as the following:1. The high school chemistry teacher and pre-service teacher understand ten core concepts meaning and their relationships very well, but the junior middle school chemistry teacher only clarity five concepts, which are atomic structure, nucleus, proton, neutron and electron. The relationship of orbit, electron level, energy level, quantum number and state of electron are ambiguous.2. The concepts which exit in junior middle school chemistry teacher minds are visualization, while the high school chemistry teachers thought professionally and academically.3. The cognitive structure richness of high school chemistry teachers show higher than the others. During the three groups, the totality of association words, which come from the middle school chemistry teacher, is the lowest.4. For the high school chemistry teachers, the totality of association words differentiates remarkably on both academic degree and graduate college. The higher academic degree, the higher the totality. The teachers, who graduated from normal university administrated by the ministry of education, obtain high totality.5. For the junior middle school chemistry teachers, there is no discrepancy on different genders, areas, teaching age, academic degree and graduate college. Teachers from guanzhong region associate more words. When the teaching age change from 11 to 15 years, the high school chemistry teachers get the most words, conversely the junior middle school chemistry teachers associate the lest words. The study is innovative in the following aspects:(1) The participants of the study are chemistry teachers. (2) New methods that are tree construction and word association are used to exploring teachers'cognitive structure. (3) Choosing a special knowledge structure "atomic structure", then we can research the cognitive structure about it deeply.