The Research Progress And Enlightenment On Overseas Technology Education In Basic Education

Coming to the21st century, the impact of science and technology on human lifehas been increasingly obvious and profound. Faced with new opportunities andchallenges, advanced technology and high-quality technical talent has become the keyto enhance national competitiveness. As technology plays an increasingly important rolein human social life, many countries have begun to incorporate technology educationinto the core curriculum in basic education stage. Technology education in basiceducation started late and related research is weak in our country while some foreigncountries set an early foot in this field and have made some broad and profoundresearches and accumulated a great deal of experience. There will always be manysimilarities in the historical development trajectory, it’s of great significance for us tocard and learn from the development process and the experience of promotion andreform abroad.Professional journal is the best choice for tracking the latest research achievementsand understanding the development trend of academic research due to its continuouspublication, fresh contents and close contact with the pulse of the times. The study isbased on Journal of Technology education which is authoritative and widely recognizedin the field of technology education. Bibliometric methods are used to analyze theexternal characteristics and content characteristics of103articles published in JTE from2001to2010and then outline the international basic technology education researchtrajectory.During the analysis on the external characteristics, the author found that: (1) JTE has been developing smoothly with a definite principle and the informationhas increased slightly.(2) The characteristics of JTE author are: concentrative distribution and diverseidentity. The author groups of technology education are mainly concentrated inuniversities, and the author from other industries is growing.(3) The research strength has the features of distribution-intensive and significantdifferences in terms of geographical. Despite the differences of five continents and themain study group concentrated in the United States, more and more countries begin tocover this field, which inflects international concern on basic technology education.Through the study of content characteristics of JTE, following points were found:(1) Diversification of research topics and obvious difference on the emphasis ofdifferent themes in the field of technology education.(2) There is an emphasis on curriculum and curriculum integration research is theresearch focus.(3) Technology teacher education is concerned.(4) Technology literacy and technical thinking showed a trend of slight growth.(5) Classroom activities and students’ learning are neglected and there is in lack ofresearch on evaluation of technology education.(6)Qualitative and quantitative alternately become the dominant research methodof technology education and the combination of qualitative and quantitative will be themain research method in the future.Based on the above study, some points are derived for our Chinese technologyeducation study:(1) Strengthening the support of policy to accelerate the pace of improvement ofcurriculum standards.(2) Reinforcing technology teacher education to promote the teacherprofessionalization.(3) Deepening the reform of the basic education curriculum to improve technologycurriculum system.(4) Using scientific and standardized research method to conduct diversified andcomprehensive study.