A Comparative Study And Analysis For Secondary Physics Education Between Developed And Developing Areas

Guided by the same Curriculum Standard of Physics, different areas of China, due to their disparities in geography and economy, will inevitably enforce the new philosophy in the standard to different extents. In this dissertation, the current situations of secondary physics education in both developed and developing areas of China have been investigated and compared from different aspects based on this new curriculum standard.In the aspect of physics textbooks, the author compared two sets of textbooks edited by Shanghai Education Press (SEP) and People's Education Press (PEP) since they apply to students in developed and developing areas of China, respectively. It was found that each set of textbook is able to meet the requirement of its local students in terms of knowledge structure and content, scientific exploration as well as illustration and activity section. Besides, the developed areas enjoy an advantage of abundant curriculum resources compared with the developing areas.With respect to physics teachers, the teaching staff in developing areas suffers problems of imbalance of sex ratio, aging, lack of professionalization, low income and heavy workload. Besides, they have poor understanding of the new curriculum standard compared with teachers in developed areas. In all aspects of experimental teaching, scientific exploring teaching and teaching of emotional attitude and value, gaps of varying degrees persisted between teachers from developing and developed areas.On the student side, the author discovered no obvious difference on the attitude and acknowledgement towards physics between students from these two areas. However, students from developing areas did show a significant disparity in physics experimental ability and exploratory ability when comparing to their counterparts in developed areas. While the disparity became unobvious with regard to their emotional attitude and value.Finally, four suggestions were offered by the author to improve the secondary physics education in developing areas.