Design And Application Of Learning Scaffolds To Improve Problem-solving Ability Of Junior High School Students

With the increasing emphasis on the cultivation of problem-solving ability at home and abroad,scholars at home and abroad have begun to pay attention to the research field of problem-solving ability.Under the current society evolution trend,the "General High School Information Technology Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition)" states that the education system should pay more attention on training students' knowledge,skills and problem-solving abilities.However,the current problem-solving ability of high school students is far from satisfying,evidences show that the current teaching methods contain improvement areas to increase students' learning efficiency.Therefore,our research attempts to design a new instructional scaffolding to improve the problem-solving ability of high school students,implementation of the new scaffolding will benefit both teachers and students.Our research browsed through numerous domestic and foreign literatures on information technology course materials,problem-solving skills,and instructional scaffolding.We will first identify the flaws in the current education systems by questionnaire and interview;then,based on the society trend,to subsequently design a successful instructional scaffolding for the education system.Next,the designed scaffolding will be tested on a group of students.The pilot will enable identification of potential problem,and thus to adjustment the new scaffolding accordingly.We aim on optimize the new scaffolding before a complete implementation on the education system.The results from the pilot demonstrates our new instructional scaffolding is effective on improving the students' problem-solving abilities.The results may slightly vary depending on the students' sexes,intellectual level,and computer literacy capability;however,the variation is not significant,and the overall results demonstrate great improvements.Thesis Contents are as follows:Chapter one:This chapter briefly presents the background and purpose of this research,introducing our research ideas,methods,objectives,and contents.This section provides an indepth analysis on current students' problem-solving ability and its correlation to the instructional scaffolding.Chapter two:This section will also review the findings from domestic and foreign literatures on information technology courses,today's students' problem-solving capabilities,and instructional scaffolding.Based on the analysis,we incorporate the meaningful learning theory,pragmatism learning theory,zone of proximal development,and constructivist learning theory as theoretical support to design a new instructional scaffolding.Chapter three:This section analyzes student surveys regarding their opinions and suggestions on current academic materials and learning methods,and the professor interviews regarding current teaching method.Survey analysis provide a direction and practical basis for our scaffolding design.Chapter four:This section presents the process of building the instructional scaffolding,how was the previous analysis on concepts,theories,and survey results used to complete the building process.According to the instructional scaffolding and the content of junior high school information technology course,we will design teaching cases.Chapter five:This section presents how the new scaffolding was tested in a small group on students to improve the problem-solving ability,including the process of testing group selection and other related details of the pilot.We will analysis the results collected from the pilot and discuss the effectiveness of the new instructional scaffolding.Comparing the before and post fluctuations of the students problem-solving ability level,also whether different types of students have a significant improvement under the new scaffolding.Chapter six:Lastly,we conclude the research with our test findings and summarize innovation and flaws of the research.What's more,we will provide suggestions for improvements in the new instructional scaffolding to further increase effectiveness in the education system.