A Study On Teaching And Practice Of Chemistry Units Based On Learning Progression

The call of the times and society for high-quality talents has raised the need for structural reform in high school classroom teaching.Unit teaching is a teaching that aims at developing and cultivating students’ core literacy,integrating teaching contents into certain themes according to the inner logical relationship of knowledge and students’ cognitive characteristics.How to integrate fragmented knowledge points and make them appear structured is a question that every educator thinks about.A solution to this problem is provided by the concept of learning progressions,which describe the developmental path that students follow when learning content on a given topic.A learning progression design can comprehensively cover the content of a thematic unit,construct a highly feasible learning path for students,and guide them to gradually deepen the knowledge they have been exposed to over a period of time so that they can better achieve a holistic and progressive unit of instruction.Based on the current situation that there are few cases of empirical studies on learning progression-based unit teaching,this study selects Chapter 3 of Senior 1 Chemistry Compulsory 1,"Iron Metal Materials",as an example,and investigates the design and practice of learning progression-based unit teaching by using literature review,survey research and educational experiment method based on the theory of nearest development area and spiral curriculum theory.The theoretical research section defines the concepts of learning progression and unit teaching,and compares the current status of their research,and determines that this study focuses on the learning progression research of chemistry subject competence.The core research is Chapter 3 and Chapter 4,where the unit progression variables are determined according to the unit content.Based on Professor Wang Lei’s four-dimensional model of subject competence,the unit progression model of "Iron Metal Materials" is constructed,and nine levels of learning ability performance indicators are formulated with the progression levels of learning comprehension ability,application practice ability and transfer innovation ability.The overall teaching objectives of the unit were determined by analyzing the teaching contents and the current situation of students,taking "understanding the metallic materials behind the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge from a chemical perspective" as the learning theme of the unit,adopting the teaching method of role-playing,putting students in the perspective of the designer of the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge and the person in charge of the steel plant,and starting the learning progression based on the real situation.The unit is divided into 5 lessons,and the instructional design is given in terms of lesson time.The empirical study was carried out in a high school in Chongqing,where four classes of senior high school students were administered the pre-test of subject competence,and senior high school class 12 and senior high school class 18,which had no significant difference in the total score of the pre-test and the score of each subject competence index,were selected for the teaching experiment.The results showed that the unit instructional design based on learning progressions did not differ from traditional classroom instruction in developing basic competencies such as recognition and memory and generalization and association,but better developed students’ higher-order thinking and improved chemistry subject competence levels.This study hopes to provide a reference for front-line teachers to carry out unit instructional design,but due to the small sample size of the study,the short duration of the study and the author’s lack of experience,the instructional design is incomplete and inadequate,and the unit instructional design based on learning progressions needs to be constantly revised and tested.In addition,the design of this unit is still based on the textbook unit,which does not show the characteristics of the "big unit" well,and later researchers can learn from this.