An Investigation Of The Middle School Students’ Chemical Literacy

The cultivation of students’ scientific literacy is the developmental tendency of the basic education reform in the world and the fundamental goal of the Eighth Basic Education Curriculum Reform, which is carried out in our country. Therefore to develop and improve the chemical literacy, which is a crucial part of scientific literacy, is urgently needed. Moreover, it is an essential task of the chemistry teaching. However, the consensus of chemical literacy has not been made and there is a lack of investigation and practice towards chemical literacy among the middle school students.This research enriches the concept of chemical literacy and puts forward five assessment indexes of the chemical literacy. Besides, it also collects a large number of data about the middle school students’ chemical literacy from the two questionnaires, which is desired and issued by the author. The result indicates that (Ⅰ) there are different recognition in the concept of chemistry, migration and application of chemical knowledge, thinking mode and scientific research between liberal arts students and science students;(Ⅱ) students’ chemical literacy do not increase with the grade increasing;(Ⅲ) the middle school students are not only lack of the capacity of collecting and analyzing information but also not good at expressing;(Ⅳ) the deficiency of experimental design and scientific research is also a problem.In addition, how the scene teaching affects the middle school students’ chemical literacy is studied in this research through teaching experiments. We find that the scene teaching does not have a significant impact on the overall level of students’ chemical literacy, but it does improve the students’ reading and discrimination ability to a certain extent.Finally, some suggestions concerned with curriculum design, teachers’ quality, teaching evaluation and the school management are put forward to improved the middle school students’ chemical literacy.