Teaching Research On Developing High School Students’ Chemical Engineering Thinking Ability Based On STEAM Education Concept

Currently,global education is in a period of accelerated change and each country’s demands for talent are constantly increasing.China’s new curriculum reform also proposes to develop students’ core literacy and cultivate high-quality compound talents’ educational goals.Chemical engineering thinking,as a high-level thinking,is an important component of core literacy and plays an important role in the comprehensive development of students’ quality.STEAM education is an interdisciplinary and comprehensive education that integrates science,technology,engineering,art,and mathematics.It features comprehensiveness,activity,situationality,problem orientation,and other characteristics.Its concept is highly compatible with chemical engineering thinking and thus has received more and more attention from people.This article aims to explore teaching models for cultivating high school students’ chemical engineering thinking guided by the STEAM education philosophy,and to improve students’ ability to solve complex problems from a real situation perspective.This provides ideas and practical experience for the cultivation of high-quality innovative and compound talents during the basic education stage in China.This study first analyzed and sorted out the relevant literature on chemical engineering thinking,engineering thinking and STEAM education at home and abroad,clarified the relevant concepts and understood the research status.Guided by constructivism theory,pragmatism theory,and situational teaching theory,and referring to a large number of literatures,the constituent elements of chemical engineering thinking were deconstructed.According to the characteristics of chemical engineering thinking,it was divided into four parts: "practical innovative thinking","social value thinking","safety and environmental protection thinking",and "complex balance thinking".Through questionnaire surveys,interview studies,and other methods,the current development status of students’ chemical engineering thinking,the cultivation methods of chemical engineering thinking in current chemistry teaching,and the application of STEAM education in teaching practice were understood.The problems existing in frontline teaching were discovered and some teaching practice suggestions were obtained.Then,a general teaching process for cultivating students’ chemical engineering thinking under the STEAM education philosophy was constructed from four aspects: teaching content selection,teaching design,teaching implementation,and teaching evaluation.Teaching designs were written based on the cases of "the development and utilization of seawater resources" and "the industrial production of soda ash",and teaching practices were carried out during the educational internship period.Before and after teaching practice,a combined evaluation mode of paper-and-pencil tests and self-assessment questionnaires was used to evaluate students’ chemical engineering thinking,and SPSS software was used to process and analyze the evaluation results to test the teaching effectiveness.In conclusion,this study found that:(1)Schools and teachers in current frontline teaching do not pay enough attention to students’ chemical engineering thinking.High school students lack chemical engineering thinking skills and the implementation of STEAM education in high school chemistry is insufficient.(2)STEAM education is a good carrier for cultivating high school students’ chemical engineering thinking.Teaching models based on STEAM education can effectively promote the growth of students’ chemical engineering thinking and improve their ability to solve practical problems in real situations.(3)The development of students’ chemical engineering thinking can develop their core literacy and contribute to the overall growth of their comprehensive literacy.However,there are some limitations in this study,such as short practice periods,small sample sizes,and single evaluation methods,which need to be continuously improved in future research.