Preliminary Study On The Key Competence Framework Of Biology In The Compulsory Education Stage (grades 7-9)

Since the 20th century,with the continuous advancement of curriculum system reform, international society have paid increasingly attention to students’ growth,attached great importance to cultivate students’ key competencies which meet the demands of modern society, emphasized the promotion of students’ multidisciplinary abilities. As a scientific discipline which aims to study life phenomena and law of biological activities, biology is indispensable in terms of schooling and training students’ scientific qualities, researches of corresponding disciplinary key competencies are irreplaceably and individually valuable.We explored the biology key competencies of junior school students via literature analysis, questionnaire and interviews (including collective and individual)etc. Biology key competencies were defined according to relevant literatures. After according to lots of researches about junior middle school biology and science disciplines at home and abroad, and combining with suggestions from specialists and frontline teachers, we selected five first-class indicators of junior middle school students’ biological key competencies as follows: construction of biological knowledge; biological practice; scientific thinking; data processing and analysis;understanding, establishment and application of biological model. Based on first-class indicators, thirteen second-class indicators were summarized according to biological disciplinary theories and demands of social development. According to the theory of cognition development emphasized by SOLO classification theory, the contents of the second-class indicators were described as the performance of students’ specific behavior (classified as "unqualified", "qualified", "good" and "excellent"). A questionnaire was made to investigate junior high school teachers’ degree of acceptance of these contents above, some controversial issues were adjusted by specialists, and then, fifty-two third-class indicators were obtained. Finally, a biological key competencies framework of compulsory education (grade 7 to 9) was formed, which supposed to provide theoretic basis for developing monitoring tools of biological academic quality and support frontline teachers’ work in junior high school.