Evaluation Study On Junior Middle School Students’ Thinking

Though improving students’ thinking skills is an essential goal for school education, and it has greatsignificance to their lifelong development, how to train and evaluate thinking skills come to be a difficultproblem for teachers. Therefore, exploring visible means to analyze and evaluate students’ thinking skillseffectively has vital significance to improve physics teaching in middle school.In this research, the participants were junior3students of four classes in an upper secondary school inXinxiang city. With the guidance of foreign relative researches with thinking skills, this study evaluatedstudents’ thinking skills with authentic tasks. First, the researcher presented authentic tasks in the form oftest paper, designed problems, displayed students’ thinking process and outcomes, and set concrete criteria.Then, the researcher analyzed the test papers according to these criteria. The conclusions are as follows:First, on the whole, the total level of the three kinds of thinking skills tested was not good. Supportconstruction was the weakest among them, the next was error analysis, and deduction was the best. Indeduction, students’ ability of gaining critical information was weakest. In support construction, students’ability of providing theoretical basis and proving other arguments to be wrong were weakest. In erroranalysis, students’ ability of rethinking different opinions and elaborating the wrong point were theweakest.Second, there were significant correlations among the three kinds of thinking skills. Further, indeduction, the three dimensions all had significant correlation with it. Among the three dimensions, relatingthe situation with former knowledge had significant correlation with analyzing and explaining situation,while gaining critical information had significant relevance to none of them. In support construction, thefive dimensions all had significant correlation with it. Among the five dimensions, they all had significantcorrelations except the relationship between giving examples of objects and giving personal view. In erroranalysis, the four dimensions all had significant correlation with it while they had significant correlationwith each other.Third, for the three kinds of thinking skills, there were no significant differences in gender, but they allhad significant correlation with mid-term achievement.