Research On Difficulties In Geography Learning For Senior One Students

Geographical literacy is a part of the cultural literacy required by modern society and forms an indispensable basis of one's life-long study and sustainable development. It plays an important role in laying a foundation for developing the country's various talents. The rationale of geography in school curriculum is " to give the country's citizen the necessary geographical literacy and meet the students' various needs for further study in geography". It is precisely for this purpose that every effort should be made to enable students to study geography well at schools. Senior One Geography is the foundation of school geography which should be found interesting and be learnt well by the students. To the writer's surprise, however, this is not the case. In her teaching experience at school, she finds that the Senior One students are not very interested in geography and find it difficult to learn. As a result, not a few of them are a bit scared of the subject. To remedy this situation, this dissertation examines the difficulties the Senior One students encounter in the course of their study, analyses the causes underlying them and proposes some solutions in the light of the specific features of geographical science.This dissertation is based on a survey made by sending out a questionnaire to the Senior One students of Guang Ya High School, Guangzhou and guided by theories of modern pedagogy and psychology.This dissertation falls into four parts:Part 1 is the Chapter 1, which is the introduction describing t entry point of this research, the object of study and the research methods employed.Part 2 is the Chapter 2, mainly dealing with the difficulties of the Senior One students in studying geography and the learning theories as to how to cope with them.Part 3 includes Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, which is the core of this article, of which the third and fourth chapter is the focus of this paper. They include the analysis of a students survey by questionnaire, their learning difficulties and the strategies proposed to help them. Finally, combining the strategies' research of this dissertation, take "Section 4, Chapter 1 in Geography Compulsory 1, the Forces in the Sculpting of Earth's surface" as an example for the design of the teaching plan and the studying plan. Part4 is the conclusion of this research.The main contributions of this study are as below:1. In this dissertation, the reasons of the difficulties of learning geography in Senior One are studied completely based on the combination of qualitative and quantitative and the combination of the whole and the cases, by means of qualitative research methods, questionnaire methods and so on. There are various factors to make it difficult for students of Senior One to learn geography, including geographic discipline, students' learning attitude, interest, cognitive ability and other reasons. Teachers' educational idea, teaching manner and environment of society, family and school will also impact students' study. These factors are closely linked, impact each other and restrict the geographic study of students of Senior One. They constitute a internal closely contact system. In this system, when one of the factors goes wrong, other factors may also be affected. It will finally have influence on the student and even make it hard for the student to learn geography.2. It discussed the solution to the difficulties in geography learning of Senior One students from all aspects of teaching. Catch the main factor of the system and adjust it, make it easy, interesting and wonderful for the students to learn. Then finally let the students learn geography good. Specifically, the teacher may starting from students' interests, pay attention to the individual differences and take the student as the main body. In teaching process, the teacher should optimize their metacognitive to make them master effective learning methods, and choose the appropriate teaching methods for teaching according to the characteristics of geographic discipline in Senior One. It is particularly recommended to use the studying plan on the grounds of the content of teaching materials and knowledge base of students, which is an effective method for guiding students to construct geographical knowledge system independently.3. According to the above strategies, the teaching plan and the studying plan are designed in order to strengthen its maneuverability and practicality.