Research On Secondary Students' Ability For Predicting Physical Phenomena Based On Life Situations

Physics phenomena that occurs in life situations is the best material for students to learn physics. However, predicting imminent physics phenomena with actual material is a common problem encountered by many students. This problem is also confuses secondary school teachers. What's the reason that students cannot make use of knowledge they have learned? Research on such issues would theoretically help teachers find the answer to the puzzle.To study these issues, the author carefully designed the two life-related topics to research this puzzle. When bread is heated, how will its temperature change("heating bread" in shot), and when the coke is put into ice, how will its temperature change ("ice-coke" in shot). Using these two topics, the author makes a study on the characteristics of students when predicting the physics phenomena.The author undertakes a systematic investigation,using paper test method and interview method, studying a total of 59 students who are separately from the two grades:senior one 35 and junior two 24. The contents of the study are:(1)what is the difference of the characteristics of student's prediction in the two different level topics; (2)what strategy the students will take to predict physics phenomena;(3)what's the difference in prediction type of the two grades; (4)what's the reason for the wrong prediction.With the active cooperation of subjects, the author have got rich first-hand information in detail, and on the basic of the extensive literature and others' study, through classification and analysis, the author gets some characteristics the students show when they are predicting:(l)The higher level physics phenomena is, the worse students' predictions are; (2)From strategies taken by students, the junior students are more likely to predict intuitively; (3)Students have difficulties in the exclusion of secondary factors and highlighting the main factors;(4)Simply rely on knowledge but neglect of the actual situation; (5)When predicting, many students use knowledge and analogy inappropriately;(6)The senior students consider the issue more comprehensively;(7)Students are influenced by life experiences greatly.In shot, when encountering the physics phenomena in life situations, students will give some predictions which will have some degree of bias with the experimental results.This maybe due to the way of knowledge representation in class, learning style of students and the teaching type of teachers and so on. These facts are the reason why the students cannot adjust to complex physics phenomena in life situations, and cannot make use of knowledge to build a reasonable model, so their predictions are different from experimental results.According to the conclusion, the author also give some advice for teachers:(1)Exploit material in life situation, encourage students to learn in the way of daily life thinking, learn to exclude secondary and unrelated factors,and build a model;(2)Give junior school students more instruction;(3) Create class filled with more life situation by addressing the physics issues in daily life by analyzing the physics phenomena in daily life to make students study more happily, and become more interested in physics even science.Finally, the author made reflection for the key aspects such as research design and data analysis, and presented the unsolved problem to continue to study in the future job and also for the reader to think about.