The Research And Comparations Of Representation Models In Chinese And American Textbooks

From long time ago to now,the teaching for knowledge contents is the key job in high school science teaching and learning,even the examination-oriented education system regards the grasp of knowledge contents as the most important thing for students.Actually,the knowledge's external representations are as important as the internal contents.Through the reading and the study to a number of literatures,this thesis proposes a concept---representation model,which can be used to classify the external written representations of knowledge,this concept can be seemed as a kind of model in the broad sense.Based on the backgrounds about the research trends of international science education area's developments ? the critical role of model in science and education?the current researches which have been done on textbook representation models in China,and by studying and improving the classification system of representation models in a paper published in 1998,which was written by two learners A.G.Harrison and D.F.Treagust,this thesis extends the number of the classification system members to nine and develops the operational definition of each kind of representation models.And then,in order to reveal the external ways in the representations of knowledge in the textbooks,this study uses the representation models classification system which has already been “localized” to analyse the knowledge contents of the two sets of Physics textbooks belonging to China and America.Results are as follows:1?On each of the twelve content topics,the kind or the number of the representation models varies from Chinese textbooks to American textbooks.2?On each Physics knowledge content topics belonging to Chinese textbooks and the counterpart of the American textbooks,there exists significant difference(P<0.05)on the magnetic field topic?molecular kinetic theory topic and kinesiology topic between the two sets of the textbooks.No significant difference exists in the rest of the two sets of the textbooks.3?On each content topics,when it comes to the distribution of the frequency of each representation model on knowledge points,there exists significant difference(P<0.05)on the molecular kinetic theory topic and kinesiology topic between the two sets of the textbooks about the scale model.No significant difference exists in the rest of the two sets of the textbooks' topics.4?As a whole,there exists significant difference(P<0.05)between the two sets of textbooks on the kind and the frequency of the representation models,concretely,in scale model?character-showing model?mathematic model and theoretical model,Chinese textbook has more members than American textbook.This thesis' s fifth part starts from the discussion about the representation models from the angels of teachers‘ teaching and students' learning,teachers can use representation models to enhance the teaching availability,students can use them to improve the understandings of knowledge points.Representation is the key to grasp the content.One more thing,textbooks knowledge contents may be developed by multiple representation models.The further research of this study may be this: Some researchers can conduct some education experiments to verify some hypotheses,and then,some another subjects,such as chemistry or biology,can also use this representation models system to do the same things as what this thesis has done.