Research On Integration Of HPS Into Biology Classroom Teaching In Senior High School

Faced with new demand to the talent quality by the intellectual economy and the trend of globalization in the 21st century,the educational circles at home and abroad attach importance to the improvement of national scientific literacy.The nature of science(NOS)is one of the cores of scientific literacy.Making students understand the methods of scientific research and NOS is an important approach to develop the potential education of natural science.In today's environment of advocating scientific quality-oriented education,we need urgently a kind of effective method to promote students' understanding of nature of science,and HPS education is a reliable choice.HPS is the abbreviation of the history of science,philosophy of science and sociology of science,which was first put forward by Mach,a scientist from Austria.Later on,the British scholar J.Osborn and M.Monk developed it into a new teaching pattern for science curriculum of primary and secondary school,which was introduced into China in 1997.This new teaching pattern requires the integration of some relevant contents from History,Philosophy and Sociology of science into the science curriculum,aiming to guide the student to understand the relations between science development and the development of society,culture and related disciplines,and understand fully the essence and law of scientific development.HPS,acting as an important way to explore the science and culture,has been given widely attention from the world.Now,HPS has been a hot topic in the international science education.However,domestic scholars have shown little concern over the research of HPS,and the research applied to teaching practices is case study and it is unsystematic.At present,none of domestic scholars has investigated the application situation of HPS in senior high school,and few people study how to enhance students' NOS from the perspective of HPS.Therefore,this thesis will focus on how to improve students'understanding of NOS.The dissertation included four main contents.The first content tend to understand fully the development status of HPS through literature research method,and sort out the theoretical foundation to guide this research from predecessors' studying results,then regard it as the research foundation of HPS teaching application.The second content was to know the understanding of biology teachers at present in senior high school towards HPS's educational contents and value,the situation of practical application in class,the recommendations for implementation and their optional method to cultivate students' scientific literacy by questionnaire survey.The third content was that we selected four subjects on history of science including "the establishment of the cell theory","the establishment of fluid mosaic model","the exploration of the nature of enzyme",and "the discovery of the photosynthesis",collected related philosophy background and materials of social situation,excavated the connotation of the nature of science from the perspectives of history,philosophy,social environment,and formed four instructional designs that highlighted the nature of science based on HPS.The last content was to exam the efficiency of students'view on NOS and their grades by incorporating HPS into senior high school teaching through experimental methodology.The results showed that the understanding of the content and value of HPS in terms of biology teachers in senior high school is rather weak,only 60%of the teachers thought that HPS education had relations with the cultivation of scientific literacy,and nearly half of them knew nothing about HPS.Only 26.67%of them had tried to apply HPS into teaching activity,which was caused by their lack of awareness of HPS teaching,insufficient class hour,and the stress from the college entrance examination,inadequate teaching resources,lack of theoretical knowledge and so on.In addition,biology teachers had realized the importance of cultivating students'scientific literacy,but their concept of nature of science was weak,and lack of effective training methods,therefore,the situation of training scientific literacy was pessimistic.The research result showed that the average scores of experimental class'students in NOS view reached to 50.64,but contrastive class was 46.17,the score difference reached to an extremely significant level(P<0.001)after the research.There is obvious difference(P<0.05)between the experimental class' students in experimental class and the contrastive class in terms of the sub-dimension of science explore,and the difference(P<0.01)is greatly obvious regarding the two sub-dimensions:scientific knowledge and scientific career.The specific analysis of the subscales of NOS showed that the students' scores had a significant improvement in relativity,foresee,science and society,while other factors did not have a significant progress.In addition,the HPS teaching played a certain role in promoting students'marks,but the effect was not obvious.HPS education on the biology teaching can effectively improve students'understanding of the nature of science,but the situation of HPS education and scientific literacy's training is not optimistic.In view of this,I would like to give four advice:(1)Perfect the talent selection system;(2)improve teachers' scientific literacy,so we should educate teachers and fulfill it;teachers should renovate their concept,strengthen consciously their professional knowledge and scientific literacy training;(3)improve teachers' understanding of the content and value of HPS education;(4)Increase the HPS teaching contents in textbooks and biology curriculum standards.