Contributions And Verification On The Student's Inquiry Competence

One of the most significant orientations characteristic of current educationrevolution is to involve the learners in actively acquiring knowledge, largely on theirown, to develop abilities of inquiring into science. On account of this, this paperinvestigates various factors concerning the learner's overall inner development in anattempt to discover the influence of them on learning. This paper consists of 4 chapters. The first chapter illustrates the necessity andsignificance of Inquiry Learning in terms of the learner's individual as well as socialneeds. It then briefs current research on Inquiry learning and finally produces goalsand tasks for our own study. The learners' learning mechanism is explored from apsychological angle and various factors affecting their performance are elaboratedupon, focusing especially on the learning procedure and knowledge acquisition. Anexperiment is carefully designed in order to bring to light the learner's proceduremechanism and strategic development in their independent enquiry into science. The second chapter sets the scene for later chapters. It reviews the theory ofhumanism and constructivism which serve as theoretical bases for our thesis. Whathumanism inspires us is that emphasis must be put on Learners' personal interests andinterior motivation. The theory of constructivism sheds light on our study andprovides us with a strong tool to gain some insight into how people learn and thenature of knowledge. It is held that learners construct knowledge for themselves.In this sense learning is not the passive acceptance of knowledge which already exists,rather, it is an active process in which the learner uses his previous knowledge andsensory input to constructs meaning, help solve problems and at the same timeconstantly adjust their cognitive structure. It implies that we need to take into accountvarious factors including knowledge, the learner and learning context during ourpedagogical practice and research. As this study is set in a Chinese senior highschool, we need to consider the mental factors typical of learners in this contextwithin this age range carefully.Chapter 3 expatiates on concepts and features of inquiry learning and proposes,from a cognitive perspective, those elements which contribute to the learner's mentaldevelopment and inquiry competence, namely, interest, motivation, previousknowledge, thinking competence and meta-cognitive development level.Chapter 4 describes an empirical research which was implemented in a realexplorative learning situation and was designed to discover those interior factorsaffecting the learner's inquiry competence. The paper concludes with such adiscovery: that in the inquiry learning process of physics, the cultivation of learners'meta-cognitive level and thinking strategies has a positive effect on their inquirycompetence. Furthermore, as was observed, such an approach of learning alsocauses a positive knowledge transfer from physics to other curriculums. Based onthe research results, suggestions on how to such competence in the learner wereadvanced. But It has to be noted that due to the limitation of time and teachingcondition, the result might not be applicable to all other cases and more experimentsare needed and more empirical data need to be collected to enrich both the theory andpractice...