Examination Of Scientific Thinking Ability By The High Test Physical Test Under The SOLO Classification Theory

Under the concept of core literacy,curriculum reform and college entrance examination reform are being promoted and deepened.The college entrance examination,as the most important examination at the high school level,itself has the characteristics of reflecting the concept of educational equity,undertaking the selection of talents,and shouldering the mission of promoting students’ development and implementing the establishment of moral education.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to give play to the guiding role of the GCE to promote the implementation of subject core literacy in senior secondary teaching.The use of SOLO classification theory to analyse GCE physics questions and the way in which GCE questions examine students’ scientific thinking skills and the level of examination through focused statistical analysis will not only help high school physics educators to grasp the rules and trends of GCE questions,but also help to guide teaching towards the implementation of the core literacy requirements of the subject and ultimately achieve "assessment for teaching and assessment for learning".SOLO classification theory is a qualitative assessment approach and is now widely used in analysing the assessment of students’ abilities in higher level examination questions.It classifies test questions into five levels of examination,namely the prestructural level(P),the single-point structural level(U),the multi-point structural level(M),the associative structural level(R)and the abstract extension level(E).This study investigated the existing criteria for classifying SOLO questions and found that,despite the variety of criteria,none of them could be separated from the intuitive criterion of determining the level based on the number of knowledge points,resulting in a blurred delineation of the level of related structure(R)in the SOLO classification,which makes it difficult to define the classification of questions at this level,and has an impact on the subsequent classification of questions,statistical analysis and the final conclusions obtained.In order to solve the above problems,based on the existing research results,this study developed a classification of scientific thinking ability levels based on SOLO theory,which are single point structure level(U),multiple point structure level(M),related structure level(R1),related structure level(R2)and abstraction level(E),based on the academic quality standards in the curriculum and the evaluation requirements in the Chinese College Entrance Examination Evaluation System.extended level(E).The focus was on defining the level of correlation structure based on two elements: difficulty of information processing and thinking operation process,which resolved the ambiguity of the R level.Based on the above criteria,this study uses the physics section of the National College Entrance Examination papers from 2020 to 2022 to conduct statistical analyses using SOLO classification theory to achieve a "qualitative" and "quantitative" evaluation of the scientific thinking ability of the college entrance examination questions using SOLO classification theory."The statistical analysis was carried out using SOLO classification theory.Through statistical analysis,the following conclusions were drawn from this study:(1)The main level of scientific thinking tested in the seven sets of GCSE questions from 2020-2022 is,the level of associative structure(R1).Of these,the 2020 National3 paper has a lower level of scientific thinking skills than the other six sets,and the2022 Paper A has the highest level of scientific thinking skills of the seven sets of papers.(2)A cross-sectional comparison shows that the level of scientific thinking skills required for the 2020 questions is National Paper 2 > National Paper 1 > National Paper 3,and the level of scientific thinking skills for both the 2021 and 2022 questions is National Paper A > National Paper B.(3)Through longitudinal comparative analysis,it is found that from 2020 to 2022,the examination of the level of scientific thinking skills in the National Paper A questions shows an increasing trend year by year.(4)Analysis of the level of examination of the knowledge modules revealed that the questions on electromagnetism required a higher level of scientific thinking skills.Based on the above findings,this study makes recommendations for the teaching of current high school physics and the design of the GCE examinations for educational researchers and for research work on test design.