| In the science and technology led society, scientific literacy has become more and more important in daily life. To enhance students'scientific literacy has become not only the main aim of education reform in all countries, but also one of the problems that draw educators'attention around the world.Researchers have done a large amount of researches and measurements on scientific literacy, among which the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) has been recognized around the world in recent years. Besides, researches show that a person's interest in science in his early years can predict his future study in science and work in technological field(OECD2006)The assessment of the scientific interest in PISA2006 is an important part of scientific literacy study.This study will give a brief introduction to PISA and the scientific literacy assessment in PISA. It will focus on the concepts, constitution and previous studies of scientific interest assessment, which is one component of scientific literacy.This study includes two parts, one of which adopts the scientific interest questions to test the middle school students in Shanghai. 933 grade one students are drawn as the subject from 4 senior high schools, who are tested with the PISA scientific interest questions and whose background information is collected through questionnaire. This study intends to find out the current state of Shanghai middle school students'scientific interest and its possible reasons.The author finally gets the following results: (1)middle school students in Shanghai generally show great interest in science; (2)boy students are significantly more interested in science than girl student(sp<0.01);(3)students'scientific interests are not significantly relevant to their parents'educational background;(4)students'scientific interests are significantly relevant to the family collection of books and other learning resources,(p<0.01)and not significantly relevant to the non-learning resources. (5)students'scientific interests are significantly relevant to their grades in science courses(p<0.01).The second part in this study is cross-cultural research. The author makes a comparative analysis among the scientific interests in Shanghai, France, Great Britain, Japan, Hong Kong, Taipei, Macao, USA and Russia. She finds out that (1) the total scores of the middle school students'scientific interests in these nine countries or areas are significantly different, from the highest to the lowest scores are the students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, Russia, Taipei, France, USA, Great Britain, Japan; (2) students in these nine countries or areas all love science, from the highest to the lowest scores are the students in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, Taipei, Russia, France, Great Britain, USA and Japan. (3) students in these nine countries or areas don't take part in many extracurricular science-related activities, the difference among them is very significant(p<0.01),from the highest to the lowest scores are the students in Shanghai, Russia, Taipei, Hong Kong, Macao, France, USA, Great Britain, Japan.(4) all the students in these nine countries or areas make frequent choices in normal interest, and the scores are significantly different among the nine countries or areas, from the highest to the lowest scores are the students in Shanghai, Russia, Hong Kong, France, Taipei, Macao, Great Britain, USA, Japan;(5) students in these nine countries or areas have strong instrumental motivations, but there is significant difference among them(p<0.01), from the highest to the lowest scores are the students in Shanghai, Macao, USA, Taipei, Russia, Great Britain, Hong Kong, France and Japan;(6)To compare these research results of Shanghai with the PISA2006 result。The author analyzes the possible reasons for the above results, and gets a suggest which is conducive to the development of education in China. |
