Primary Research On Junior High School Students' Self-efficacy In Inquiry Activity

Science education aims at improving people's science literacy through giving them science knowledge, science spirit and science method. Science inquiry reflects the nature and course of science and is the main concern in science education. But when it comes to the teaching and leaning in class, it confronts a lot of difficulties including shortage of self-efficacy and inner motive. Thus, researching on students'self-efficacy is not only helpful to complete the science inquiry theory but also useful to improve students'inquiry initiative, efficacy and ability.Self-efficacy is defined as people's beliefs about their capabilities to achieve a goal or an outcome. It is proposed firstly in Bandura's essay"Self-efficacy: a comprehensive theory of behavioral change". Students'self-efficacy means students'beliefs about their capabilities to fulfill their learning tasks and particular learning activity. Research shows that students'effort, attitude,persistence and leaning strategy is affected by their self-efficacy and their self-efficacy will affect their learning achievement.To learn the roles self-efficacy plays in science inquiry activity, questionnaire on science inquiry and self-efficacy are designed to give to middle school students in order to analyze the development of students'self-efficacy in inquiry. Besides that, interviews are given to some students to explore the students'self-efficacy in different opening scale activities. Through the interview, the effect of different opening scale to inquiry can be researched and it will be good evident to designers whose aim is to make more effective inquiry activity and will also a helpful to improve students'self-efficacy.To achieve these purposes of the study, we fix on the research contents as follows:1) The development characteristics and general trends of middle school students'self-efficacy of science inquiry;2) Comparison of different gender and different grades of junior high school students'Self-efficacy of science inquiry;3) The relationship between students self-efficacy of learning and self-efficacy of inquiry activity;4) The relationship between the self-efficacy of scientific inquiry and behavior in inquiry; 5) Correlation Analysis of academic achievement and self-efficacy of scientific inquiry;6) The effect of different opening scales to the fulfillment of inquiry activities by students'with different self-efficacy.After the above study, the results were shown as follows:1)Self-efficacy in science inquiry of Junior high school students have significant grade difference. Analysis of variance and multiple comparisons can post that eighth-grade students have the lowest self-efficacy level in scientific inquiry, seventh grade and ninth grade students'self-efficacy are higher than eight graders, but there is no significant difference between seven graders and nine graders. The standard deviation of self-efficacy in scientific inquiry increases with grade.2)Self-efficacy both in science inquiry and in learning of junior high school students had significant grade difference, and boys'are higher than girls'significantly.3)Self-efficacy level in science inquiry of eight graders and nine graders both had significant gender difference but not the same as seven graders. This gender difference also exists in learning self-efficacy level.4)Three grade students have reached 0.000 extremely significant correlation between the level of'learning self-efficacy and self-efficacy in scientific inquiry.It shows that the junior high school students'learning self-efficacy is associated with self-efficacy in science inquiry in general terms.5)Self-efficacy in scientific inquiry and the capability of problem solving is also significantly related. Seventh and eighth graders'self-efficacy in science inquiry are significantly positively correlated with。Ninth graders'self-efficacy in science inquiry was only positively related to their problem-solving ability in guided inquiry.6)Three graders'self-efficacy in science inquiry are significantly positively related to their achievement. Students with good achievement have higher self-efficacy level in scientific inquiry.7)Scientific exploration of different levels of self-efficacy and levels of students in level of the exploration activities are two significant differences.8)Different students to face different levels of exploration activities opening up significant differences.