| After the observation on how the students did the chemistry experiment exercises in my teaching practice, I discovered the common characteristics among most of the students. The basic knowledge and theories of chemistry experiment can be understood by students, but they may encounter all sorts of difficulties while working out the answers to these exercises, which leads to great loss of points on experiment exercise in tests, In order to figure out the thinking obstacles during the process of solving problems, the author applies the methods of oral report and questionnaire to investigate the process of problem solving.Affected by questionnaire design and the subjects, it is so hard to gain information with questionnaires that the effect is not as well as what is expected. However, by recording the students’brain and psychological activities, transforming and analyzing the record files, the obstacles of solving problems and the reasons for that can be found. The method of oral report can truly reflect the thinking process of subjects and discover some unknown problems that cannot be noticed on exercise books. Thus, it makes up the shortcomings of questionnaire approach.This study selected 54 grade two students from a parallel class in a senior high school that the author has taught as the research subjects, the verbal protocol is adopted to analyze the reasons why high school students encounter various difficulties in completing experimental exercises, and teaching strategies are put forward to facilitate students’ learning of chemical experiments.This thesis is made up of 6 chapters:Chapter 1 introduces the research background.The second chapter is the literature review of the status quo of verbal protocol at home and abroad as well as the previous studies on the current state and the existing problems in various areas in China. At the same time, it also expounds the three theories on which this study is based:constructivism, learning theory, mastering learning theory, meaningful receptive learning theory.The third chapter is about the analysis of four types of chemical experiments and problems in working out these four types of experimental exercises.The fourth chapter is the implementation of the verbal protocol, which is the main part of the thesis. This section includes the preparation process of verbal protocol, the design of verbal test and analysis of the recording material transformation and two case studies of one gifted student and one underachieving student. The author finds that there are four reasons for students’ problems in completing chemical experimental exercises:lack of ability to distinguish experimental characteristics; lack of knowledge and experience in problem solving; low level of chemical knowledge structure; low sense of self-efficacy of among underachieving students.The fifth chapter provides some teaching strategies for high school students to deal with experimental exercises. The causes of students’ obstacles in experimental exercises are analyzed based verbal protocol. Some effective experimental teaching strategies are put forward so as to improve the students’ ability to analyze and solve chemical experiment exercises.The sixth chapter is the research prospect. This section points out the limitations of this research, because the present study is solely based on one research method and small-sized subjects. Besides, the teaching strategies have not been put into teaching practice.The innovation of this study is the application of verbal protocol which records and reflects subjects’ mental process of solving problems in an actual way. Compared to analysis of written experimental exercises, the present research method is much more convincing. |
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