Research On The Development Of Middle School Students' Scientific Explanation Ability

Constructing scientific explanation is an important content in education activities.It is part of significant process in scientific knowledge acquisition and the purpose of scientific research as well.According to The Curriculum Standard for Physics,scientific explanation ability is one of the key abilities which requires both middle school students and high school students to master.As the main place to deliver physics knowledge,build core capabilities and promote disciplinary literacy,physics classes in middle schools are essential for teachers to develop the students' scientific explanation ability.Therefore,teachers should pay more attention to the development of middle students' scientific explanation ability in class.By organizing and analyzing the existing literature,defining the concept of scientific explanation and holding onto Claim-Evidence-Reasoning frame,this research set up an evaluation standard of scientific explanation ability,which matches with the scientific explanation levels of middle school students.After testing the present situations of the students,it is found that their scientific explanation levels are low,scientific explanation frame is not clear to them and also they are weak in demonstrating.According to the present scientific explanation level of them,this research provide a strategy to develop the scientific explanation ability of middle school students.Based on The Curriculum Standard for Physics,the teaching materials and the high school entrance exams of the recent 5 years,the author did the experiments on the 9 graders in 2 different classes in the same school during everyday education activities.One semester later,the students' scientific explanation ability level of the experimented class is much higher than the other class.Also the number of the students getting high scores is much larger than the other class.Comparing the students in 2 classes,the gap between their claiming ability is the smallest.However,the gap between their evidence collecting and reasoning ability has been widen.The students in experimented class are definitely improved in claiming,evidence collecting and reasoning,among which they perform best in claiming.What's more,reasoning is the fastest improved part followed by evidence collecting.This research enriched the strategy of developing the scientific explanation of the students.Hope it can be of some value to teachers who pay attention to the development of middle school students' scientific explanation.