A Survey On Senior High School Students' Present Situation Of Natural Science Readings

Many investigations indicated that middle school students' scientific literacy in our country is generally low. The new round curriculum reform attaches great importance to the improvement of middle school students'scientific literacy. To improve students'scientific literacy, not only teachers'teaching counts, students also need to read plenty of popular science books after school.This paper mainly aims at investigating senior high school students' present situation of natural science books. The questionnaires covered three different middle schools located at the provincial capital city of Jinlin, a prefecture-level city and a county. In each school, two science classes of grade two are drawn to answer the questionnaire, a total of 299 students participated the investigation. Through the survey, the present condition of senior high school students'natural science readings and the factors affect students'reading are revealed. The research draws the following conclusions:Among senior high school students'reading tendency, readings like love stories, chivalric fiction novels and recreation magazines rank first. But readings that are beneficial for students'development such as natural sciences books, biographies and social sciences reading materials only occupy 10% each. 2. Audio-video books already exceeded text readings and become the primary way and reading mode for high-school students to obtain natural popular sciences knowledge. 3. High school students comparatively pay more attention to encyclopedic knowledge that is closely related to their lives and biological science knowledge such as astronomy, geography, computer science. As for pure theory such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics they have less interest, even less interest are paid to agricultural science. The male and female students differ from the choice types on popular science books. 4. Boys and girls in senior high school have different choices for types of popular science books. Boys like astronomy, astronautics books best, computer science books rank second; girls prefer household encyclopedia books followed by nature and geography books. 5. Senior high school students devote very little time to read nature science books. They spend less than two hours on reading every week and only finish about 2 books a semester. 6. School type, family socioeconomic status and study stress do no affect students'reading preference, reading time and quantity. 7. There is no big difference between students'attitude as regard to reading both for girls and boys, but boys apparently spend more time and read more books. 8. there is a positive correlation between the degree of parents'and teachers'support and students'reading attitude, reading time and reading quantity. Finally, based on the actual situation, relevant suggestions are offered to promote healthy development of popular science reading. The author expect this study could be helpful to effective instruction of natural science readings for teachers, students, parents as well as each level of educational departments.