Research On The Cultivation Of Students' Critical Thinking Disposition In High School Physics Teaching

Critical thinking is an advanced thinking process which decides what to believe or not to believe. It helps people think and introspect, grasp the essence when they are doing something,adhere to the truth and overcome the fears of authority. Moreover, it can help them find a better solution. Critical thinking contains three aspects: skill, emotional disposition and speculation. Critical thinking skills and critical thinking disposition are two attributes of critical thinking, and there is a close relation between speculation and critical thinking disposition. Speculation is the starting point for cultivating critical thinking disposition, while critical thinking disposition is the core element of critical thinking, and it is also the soul of mind. Therefore, this paper takes critical thinking disposition as the research object,explores the concepts of critical thinking especially seven attributes of critical thinking disposition, and its relationship with teaching by literature review in accordance with the fundamental theory of critical thinking concepts and cultivation of critical thinking. It is also based on the Physics Curriculum Standards of the Ordinary High School's requirements of cultivating students' thinking capability which is in the context of new curriculum reform, and the requirements include cultivating students' inquiring ability and scientific literacy, helping them experience the process of scientific study, and teaching them to solve problems with regularities, so as to improve their abilities of analyzing, concluding and summarizing as well as the most advanced evaluating and critical ability. The seven attributes of critical thinking disposition are truth-seeking, open-mindedness, analyticity, systematicity, self-confidence,inquisitiveness and maturity. These seven attributes are the emphasis of theory and the indispensable references during investigation. Their relationship with Physics teaching is mostly about the defects and the feasibility of critical thinking disposition in today's Physics teaching. The practical investigation includes several steps as follows: first, discuss the critical thinking disposition especially the seven attributes with specialists and classmates according to available documents in order to find out the teaching behaviors which contribute to cultivating critical thinking dispositions, then compile a behavior check list of cultivating students' critical thinking dispositions, and perform data statistics of classroom investigation in conjunction with the classroom observation videos. Finally, work out the situation about how teachers help their students cultivate critical thinking dispositions, that there are many problems about Physics teachers' behavior variables when they are cultivating their students' critical thinking dispositions, for example, some of their behaviors arise frequently while some other behaviors are rare. Furthermore, a study on whether different teachers, mainlynovice teachers and experienced teachers have differences in cultivation of critical thinking disposition was carried out, and the result shows that there are differences between novice teachers and experienced teachers when they behave the same way, and some differences are totally conspicuous, some are conspicuous while some behaviors have no difference. Then analyze the reason according to the data, and verify with three classroom examples which are exercise course, laboratory course and new course. Approaches and methods which are aimed at seven attributes of critical thinking disposition are put forward in this paper to help students cultivate critical thinking dispositions in Physics teaching according to conclusions and achievements of predecessors about cultivation of critical thinking. This paper also introduced specifically that teachers should pay more attention to one certain teaching behavior in different attributes, and novice teachers should learn from experienced teachers about their teaching behaviors according to the differences between experienced teachers and them.Conclusions and deficiencies of this thesis are presented in the end of this paper, and several advice for high school Physics teachers are put forward that they should seize the opportunity of new curriculum reform to cultivate their students' critical thinking dispositions, to encourage their students not to follow blindly or follow the crowd but to be rebellious and skeptical, and to teach them to introspect and summarize experience.