Assessment Of Junior Middle School Students' Cognition Of Crosscutting Concepts "Stability And Change"

As an important tool to promote students' meaningful learning and science literacy,the crosscutting concept is one of the current research hotspots in the field of international science education.This study focused on one of the important crosscutting concepts--stability and change.Starting from the four components of identification,interpretation,speculation,and design,a 4-dimension×3-level stability and change cognitive development framework was built.We also developed assessment tools for students in grades 7,8,and 9,respectively based on the framework.In this study,the reliability and validity of the assement tools were tested and the items were optimized based on Rasch analysis results after a trial test of 144 students.Then 339 students in grades 7-9 were tested,and Winsteps 3.72.0 was used to vertically scale the test results of 3 grade students to obtain the students' ability of stability and change cognition and the difficulty of each item.This study also used SPSS to analyze and compare students' overall cognitive ability of stability and change,and the performance characteristics and differences on four specific dimensions.We analyzed the proportion of participants at each level of the four specific dimensions,and explored the impact of grade and gender on students' performance.The results showed that junior high school students' cognitive characteristics of the stability and change wer as follows:(1)The students performed best on items of interpretion,followed by identification,speculation,and design;(2)With the increase of grades,students' overall performance on "stability and change" gradually improved.According to the proportional distribution of the four dimensions,the performance of students also reflected the trend that as the science knowledge deepend,the number of students who respond at a low level decreased and the number of high-level students increased;(3)The gender difference in the overall cognition of stability and changeand in four specific dimensions were not significant;(4)Students' understanding of stability and change was related to specific knowledge modules.For example,students' understanding of earth movement was relatively easy,while energy conservation,force and movement were relatively difficult.It is suggested that teaching activities should be carried out reasonably in the order from easy to difficult.