Evaluation Studies Of Junior High School Chemistry Scientific Inquiry Ability

The new elementary education curriculum reform in China keeps the pace with the requests of the age and society, mainly emphasizes students' progress, aims at improving students' scientific literacy and cultivating students'creative spirit and practical ability. The new chemistry curriculum of junior high school promotes inquiry teaching, takes raising student's scientific inquiry capacity as an important educational goal. The scientific inquiry of compulsory education courses in chemistry, mainly refers to the important practice such as taking the initiative to obtain chemical knowledge, understanding and solving chemistry problems. It contains the elements such as proposing questions, conjecture and hypothesis, developing plans, conducting experiments, collecting evidences, interpretation and conclusions, reflection and evaluation, expression and communication. Students initially form scientific inquiry capacity through personal experience and the experience of scientific inquiry.However, how to evaluate student's scientific inquiry capacity is a difficult problem and a hot issue in recent years. In the course of the study, we have repeatedly pondered the question of how to evaluate student's scientific inquiry capacity effectively in the actual teaching. This paper attempts to introduce and analysis the existing domestic evaluation methods in chemistry learning:performance assessment, portfolio assessment and paper-and-pencil test, explores the merits of the evaluation methods, gives some suggestions and improvements about application of these three evaluation methods in junior high school chemistry teaching.This paper consists of two parts:introduction and the main body which contains three parts.In the introduction part, the paper introduces domestic situation about the evaluation of student's scientific inquiry capacity under the circumstances of new elementary education curriculum reform, and introduces the purpose and significance of this study.In the first part, the paper defines the relevant concepts of evaluation methods about student's scientific inquiry capacity, locates the idea, principles, functions, elements and objectives, and presents the theoretical foundation.The second part, the main part of the present study, focuses on the three major evaluation methods of junior high school students'chemistry scientific inquiry capacity:performance assessment, portfolio assessment and paper-and-pencil test. Paper-and-pencil test costs less as a quantitative evaluation method, which is widely used in students'academic performance in the daily evaluation and entrance examination. But its effectiveness of evaluating student's scientific inquiry capacity is being questioned all the way. Performance assessment and portfolio assessment have great desirability as qualitative evaluation methods, but they cost more and time-consuming longer when concrete implementation. This part presents the study of implementation methods, advantages, disadvantages and improvements about the three evaluation methods respectively, gives some recommendations of application of the three evaluation methods in chemistry teaching.The third part is the conclusion which summarizes the shortcomings of the present study, and discusses the prospects for study.