A Comparative Study On The Teaching Cases Of Physics Explorations Between Chinese And Foreign Junior Middle School

Scientific inquiry is an important approach to carrying out science education around the world. China’s new round of basic education curriculum reform also advocates the use of inquiry teaching mode. Due to huge differences between cultural background and educational status of countries, the specific implementation process of inquiry teaching is not the same. However, conducting a study and an analysis of foreign inquiry teaching and learning from foreign advanced teaching experiences will be helpful for enhancing the level of our inquiry teaching.Based on the cognitive structure theory, meaningful learning theory and constructivism learning theory, this paper uses the physics inquiry teaching videos for junior high school students from the United States, Australia, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic and four videos with the same teaching content in China as its research subjects. This paper first describes the teaching process of different countries, and then makes a quantitative comparison and analysis from the aspects of class structure and inquiry process.The results are listed as follows:the US inquiry class focuses on students’ experimental exploration, students’ experimental ability and their experiences during the process of experiment. Australia’s class sets up problem situations and puts forward scientific problems to encourage students to do experiments by themselves. The Netherlands aims to construct systematic structure and cultivate students’ logical thinking ability by exploring demonstration experiment and summing up relevant concepts with teachers and students together. The class of Czech Republic pays attention to teachers’explanation on the demonstration experiment and relevant concepts and the questions and answers between teachers and students. China designs classes in accordance with the following process:propose questions,make the conjecture and hypothesis, plan and design experiment, do the experiment and collect evidence, do analyses and argumentation, evaluate, communicate and cooperate.Compared to the classes of US, Australia, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, China’s classes are of full knowledge content, complete knowledge structure and linked to life closely. However, there are still some individual or common problems. For example, teachers instead of students propose the questions; students are just the experiment operator; the experiment time is short; teachers ignore students’ problems that are unrelated to the teaching content or beyond students’ knowledge ability and the experiment lacks of analysis for the data that are not conformed to the experiment requirements.By having qualitative description and quantitative analysis of inquiry teaching cases at home and abroad and combining with our junior physics inquiry teaching situation, the author puts forwards the following suggestions for the implementation process of physics inquiry teaching for junior high school:Firstly, design scientific issues carefully.Secondly, reflect students’ learning autonomy in the teaching process.Thirdly, create a relaxed learning environment.Fourthly, develop students’habit of assessing the work.Fifth, carry out extra-curricular activities related to classroom inquiry teaching.