The Problems And Difficulties In Implementing Inquiry Learning In Rural Middle Schools And Countermeasures

Today, the schooling in middle schools of China is going through a profound transformation. This transformation is a fundamental change of teachers' teaching methods and students' learning methods. The inquiry learning, which is under implementation in our country, with city schools in the lead and rural schools following, is the main way to carry out this transformation.With the use of methods of literature, investigation and study on-the-spot, this dissertation, based on the grand background of elementary education reform in China, made an investigation on the present situation of implementing inquiry learning in the six rural schools of Chongqing, aiming to find out the main problems and difficulties in implementing inquiry learning in rural schools and to analyze the causes of the problems. To deal with these problems and their causes, this dissertation has also proposed some tentative countermeasures to propel implementing inquiry learning in rural areas.The first four parts of this dissertation deal with theoretic and practical significance of implementing inquiry learning in rural schools through discussing the background, conception, and theoretic basis of it. The fifth part is an investigation by means of questionnaire survey as well as interview survey, which involves two such dimensions as the attitudes and practice, and the subjects include headmasters, teachers, students and their parents. The survey shows that there are some problems on the aspects of attitude and practice in implementing inquiry learning in rural schools. In detail, the basic facilities and equipment can't satisfy the demands of study; traditional attitudes obstruct the new course from being implemented; the atmosphere for supporting education in the whole society has not been formed; teachers' education levels restrain the implementation of the new course; lack of coordination between theory and practice also hinders schools' implementing; the relationship between traditional courses and the inquiry learning also affect the effects of the new course. On the base, the dissertation discussed how to improve it: firstly, to renew our educational ideas and build up correct guiding ideology; secondly, to strengthen teachers' training so as to improve their guiding levels; thirdly, to perfect the management system and principles to guarantee the implementation of the course; fourthly, to practice new evaluation standards to promote the new course onto the normal track; fifthly, to encourage various patterns of implementing the inquiry learning in different schools and districts; sixthly, to win support from the whole society by all-out propagating the new course and exploiting and making use of education resources.