An Assessment Of Modeling Abilities In Physics Of High School Students

Physical Model is the most common and important scientific researchmethods in physics. One of the Physicists and researchers' working methodsis to establish model and apply model. In the course of application model,they improve the model step by step. Physical Model is also important inhigh school physics. And modeling Abilities are the abilities that thestudents need to possessed. Physics teaching in high school in foreigncountries pay more attention to Model Teaching, and our educators begin tocarry on model teaching and make some achievements. But currentresearches are mostly limited to the application model to solve problems.And there is still no research on how to assess students' modeling abilities.This paper makes some discussions about modeling theory, and tries to finda method to assess students' modeling abilities.First, basing on the summary of former researches on models, modelingteaching, and modeling abilities, we define the definition of physical model,models' classification, and physics modeling abilities. Base on thisacademic research, we build a frame of assessing students' physicsmodeling abilities, and design test in mechanics to assess students of gradetwo in high school. We find that the test paper is valid and reliable. Fromthe test, we find some characteristics of students' modeling abilities, asfollows.1. The physics modeling abilities of high school students are at low level,especially in assessing the validity of physical models.2. High school students used to build a model relying on their intuition,lacking of reasonable imagination and rigorous logic.3. Their abstract ideation is not good, lacking of consciousness to ignoreminor factors when building models in real situation.4. Students are not good at applying model to solve real situation questions,easily disturbed by the superficies, and focused at the superficies.5. There is no difference between boys' physic modeling abilities and girls'. But big differences exist between students who get high achievement andlow ones, especially on difficult modeling tasks and applying model toreal situation.Then, we discuss the reasons that form the above characteristics ofstudents' modeling abilities, including two major factors, one is thatphysics teaching in high school ignored training students' modelingabilities, the other is that teaching material and students' exercises bookspay little attention to models and modeling process.At last, we give some advice about model teaching, dealing with theproblems found in this paper. They are as follows.1. Recognize the developing characteristics of students' cognition.2. Attach importance to train students' abilities of observing, analyzing andabstracting.3. Make students know physical model's characteristics and effects.4. Make students know the significance and method of building model.