Comparison And Enlightenment: History Of Science In Chinese And American Middle School Science Curriculum

In recent years, many researchers on science curriculum and science education point that history of science plays a vital role in helping people to achieve science literacy, nevertheless, latest researches show teachers and designers of teaching material often suffer failures when coping with stuff of history of science. This paper does some research on how to do a better job in science education.At the beginning of the paper, the writer illustrates and analyzes the conception of history of science, reviews the history of history of science on science education, and explains the function of history of science in science curriculum.After that, through comparison of the contents of history of science in both Chinese and American science education standards, the paper finds that in the aspect of science education standards, we have a very big gap with that of America whatever in quantity or quality. The American national science education standards is more complete systematized, it takes more emphasis on student's attitude and perspective on science and can take more objective attitude to the value of scientist in history of science. Comparing to American standard, Chinese national science education standards emphasize more on the help that history of science can bring to student on learning scientific knowledge, although they also put forward some bad example in history of science, but basically, they take a more Utopian attitude to science and scientist.The paper compares the contents of Chinese and American middle school science textbook, studies how they select material and how they present material about history of science. With regard to material selection, because the writer believe the selection of people and incidents is characteristic in material selection of history of science, so this paper take scientists and scientific incidents as standard, and emphasize on the comparison and analysis on the four aspects of gender of scientists, nationality, their times and specialization.Through the introduction of four excellent Chinese and American middle school teaching cases about history of science, the paper analyzes and compares on the aspects of how two national teachers to utilize the history of science to make situation, to develop students' understanding and demands of further study after school. The writer hopes to find some thing in these comparisons and learn something from them. Based on these comparisons, the writer put forward two teaching cases about history of science designed by her and tries to do some exploration on nationalized history of science education.At last, by making conclusion on the comparisons of Chinese and American high school history of science education, the writer bring forward some improvement suggestion on how to utilize history of science education to help student find the nature of science, develop their science literacy in science curriculum.