High School Geographical Concepts Teaching Based On Exploratory Learning

A new round of curriculum reform requires students to have higher capacity.The teaching of geographical concepts is an important part of that of geography,which is of great significance to students abilities. In recent years, although there area lot of studies related to the teaching of geographical concepts, the teaching ofgeographic concepts still cannot find the breakthrough. Many teachers focus onteaching, ignoring students’ learning process of geographical concepts, and“Misconception” during geography learning, resulting in a lot of effort but pooreffect.The author tries to combine exploratory learning with geographical concepts,emphasize the process of geographical concepts learning and construction ofknowledge, hoping that through high school geographical concepts teaching basedon exploratory learning, students can achieve leaps of ability, improvement ofinterest and enhancement of the efficiency of geographical concepts learning.The study methods of this paper are literature research, investigation andanalysis, experiment. And the following conclusions can be achieved from the study.Firstly, it illustrates the necessity of application of exploratory learning ingeographical concepts teaching, and analyzes the factors affecting the exploratorylearning of geographical concepts from four aspects-geographical concepts,students, teachers and geography textbooks.Secondly, aiming at these factors, a questionnaire survey is conducted based onfirst-line high school geography teachers to understand the teaching situation ofgeographical concepts based on exploratory learning. The following conclusions areachieved:(1) High school geography teachers think that students lack the enthusiasmand interest of geographical concepts learning; they are rather pessimistic aboutstudents’ ability to learn geographical concepts.(2) High school geography teachershave misunderstanding on the goal formulation of geographical concepts learning,and lack the consideration of three-dimensional goal of it.(3) High school geographyteachers lack observation and understanding on students misconceptions, ignoring the transition process of geographical concepts based on exploratory learning.(4)High school geography teachers’ teaching method of geographical concepts based onexploratory learning is singular, and there are only a few teachers using learningmethods such as discovery, experiment and group cooperation. They also lackguidance of the theory in the exploratory teaching of geographical concepts, andtheir choice of teaching method is casual.Furthermore, for the existing problems of high school geography teaching basedon exploratory learning, this paper takes "discovery","cooperative learning" and"exploratory experiments” as the breakthrough and elaborates the effectiveapplication strategy of these teaching methods in the exploratory learning ofgeographical concepts.Finally, after applying these strategies to teaching practice, the comparisonexperiment proves that the exploratory learning of geographical concepts can helpdevelop students geographical thinking and geographic literacy. And after a period ofexploratory learning of geographical concepts, students’ logical thinking ability hasbeen enhanced, interest in the learning of geographical concepts has been increased,and attitude towards learning geographical concepts has been more serious.