An Experimental Research On Cultivating Senior High School Students' Ability Of Physics Problem-representation

Physics is quite a practical discipline as well as an important fundamental discipline. However, in our country, most students in high school regard physics as one of the most difficult discipline and many teachers feel it difficult to teach physics. Students fear to study physics, saying it time-consuming and difficult to improve. Students often understand what they learn from teachers but don't know what to do when it comes to problem-solving. Aimed at the current situation where students feel it difficult to solve problem in physics, an approach will be put forward to cultivate problem-solving ability, for which an experimental research will be made to test its validation.At the present, the most penetrating problem teaching of physics is faced with in high school lies in that students have many difficulties solving problems, that they spend too much time in thinking over a problem, and that the master of a physics concept appears in the course of problem-solving. The key to problem-solving is a reasonable problem-representation. As Simon put it, representation is the key to problem-solving. If a problem is properly represented, half of it has been solved. Therefore, this article examines how to efficiently cultivate high school students' physics problem-representation ability in every level and how well the ability can help to reinforce students' physics problem-solving.McDermott and Larkin think there are 4 steps of representation in the course of problem-solving: the first is Literal Representation, the second naive representation, the third physical representation, the fourth mathematics representation. This argument is identified in this article, based on which this article will put forward the approach to cultivating the four levels of representation ability. The appeal is to improve high school students' ability of problem-solving. An experiment will be designed and analyzed to see how well the ability of problem representation acts on the ability of problem-solving. The experiment will reach the following conclusions:(1) The approach to cultivating the four kinds of representation: Literal Representation, Naive Representation, Physics Representation, and Mathematics Representation work can increase the students' ability of problem-solving in physics.(2) The approach adopted in this experiment works most significantly for students moderately good at mathematics and physics, fairly significantly for students fairly good at mathematics and physics, and not significantly for students poor at mathematics and physics.