| Enhancing biological scientific literacy and advocating inquiry learning is the fundamental principle of our ordinary high school biology curriculum standard. The history of biology itself is the course of scientists’exploration of life science. Learning biological history enables the students to explore biological world, understand the nature of science, explore research methods, learn the spirit of science and improve the students’ scientific literacy. Using the reasonable combination of those two parts and the Biological History as the teaching content, as well as guiding students to conduct inquiry learning are of important impact on enhancing students’scientific sense. This paper analyses the Biological History and the past and present of inquiry learning globally. We also explain the psychological evidence and the importance of the combination of two parts. This paper uses questionnaire, experimental education and education observation methods to conduct verification experiments.First of all, using the questionnaire survey method, we conducted surveys on the status and insufficient application in the combination of the Biological History and inquiry learning in high school biology classroom teachings, regarding Baotou key high schools’ students as respondents. Furthermore, we discussed and analyzed the survey results, showing that although students are of great interests in inquiry learning and the Biological History knowledge, the needs of Biological History are not met due to the lack of efficiency of current teaching status.Based on the above results, we did experimental research regarding to the teaching and instruction of Biology among Senior High School Grade One students. Our underlying philosophy of teaching is using the exploration and development of specific incidents in Biological History as thread and guide students to conduct experimental learning during the process. Along with servicing teachers, we designed teaching cases including Biological History along with inquiry learning and conducted class-teaching experiments.The experiment results show that, through the teaching method of combination of the history of biology and the inquiry learning, the period Biology course grades of experimental class and control class are of significant difference, with the experimental group’s grades much higher than the control group. Plus, when comparing situations in experimental class with control class, we found that students are more interested in and have higher enthusiasm for biology; both teachers and students are more evolved in class discussion, resulting much more lively classroom atmosphere; the students’ autonomous learning interest is extended from class to the after class; and teaching goal is achieved better in experimental class than those in control class.The result of experimental teaching demonstrates that teaching method of the combination of Biological History with inquiry learning plays a positive role in students’ attitude and interest in Biological Science, and students’ exploring thinking. The result also proved that the teaching method of the history of biology combined with inquiry learning is feasible, effective in high school stage. In addition, there also exist some problems in the teaching experiments, such as classroom teaching time is not sufficient, the course resources in combing inquiry learning and biological history is insufficient, and the attention paid on high school biology teaching is low. |
