The Exploration Of Biological Community To Improve Students’ Ability Of Scientific Inquiry

The science and technology rapidly develops on the basis of summing up predecessors’ experience with the rapid development of world civilization during the 21 st century,which increases the speed of our understanding the unknown.The scientific and technological progress needs the talent.The cultivation of talents relies on education.The traditional education is mainly focused on teaching the fixed knowledge and strengthening students’ theoretical foundation knowledge,but the practice ability is poor.Extracurricular activity is an extension of the course content.During extracurricular activities,students can learn some knowledge which is unobtainable in class.Extracurricular activities not only provide a more direct way for students to develop their many abilities,but also can make up for the lack of classroom teaching.Danyang Experimental School in southern China decided to carry out all sorts of community activities to improve students’ ability,and therefore established the biological community.The work of collating and analyzing the extracurricular activity and the related literature of science inquiry ability indicated that the traditional extracurricular activities had some problems,and the scientific inquiry ability of teenagers had not been effectively trained.The previous scholars had carried out some studies to improve the students’ ability of scientific inquiry,but it was less reported to improve students’ ability of scientific inquiry under a variety of new model of extra-curricular activities.In this study,40 students were randomly chosen from Grade seven in Danyang Experimental School in southern China.Twenty of them took part in the extracurricular activities of biological community for one year,and the others did not took part in these activities as the control group.The results of this study were as below.Among students who took part in the extracurricular activities of biological community,75% of them thought that their ability of finding problems increased,65% of them thought that their observation ability improved,95% of them thought that their practice ability improved,and 30% of them thought that their interpersonal skills improved.These abilities of experiment group were all significantly better than those of the control group.These results showed that the extracurricular activities of biological community could improve the students’ ability of scientific inquiry.During the extracurricular activities of biological community,two studies of students won honors of "the 24 th Youth Science and Technology Innovation Contest in Jiangsu Province"(the second prize)and "the 24 th Youth Science and Technology Innovation Contest in Zhenjiang"(the first prize).The extracurricular activities of biological community improved students’ knowledge level and abilities of finding problems,collaboration,collecting and analyzing data.In addition,students’ perceptual knowledge and the values of positively looking at things were effectively trained.The above results showed that the extracurricular activities of biological community not only could improve the students’ practical operating ability,but also could cultivate their ability of scientific research and exploration.The extracurricular activities of biological community in this study could provide some reference for the relative biological activities in middle school.