Research On Training The Experimental Teaching Skills For Free Teacher Education Students In Chemistry Under The New Curriculum

As the New Curriculum Reform in elementary and middle schools going on, China Ministry of Education enacted the National Chemistry Curriculum Standards, taking Quality Education as the core concept. Taking these standards as a symbol, the new chemistry curriculum brings forward higher requirements for chemistry teachers, especially in experimental teaching. Facing the challenges such as the increasing quantity of chemical experiments, synthesis types of chemical experiments, as well as the content and technology renewal of chemical experiments, the teachers’ abilities and experimental skills to teach chemical experiment have become one of the key factors that determining the success of the chemistry curriculum reform in the middle school. As a result, how to meet the demands of the new curriculum of chemistry, as well as train the research-oriented teachers effectively with chemistry experimental teaching skills under the new chemistry curriculum appear to be a realistic problem in the face of normal universities.Since the fall of2007, six universities directly under the Ministry of Education began to recruit free teacher education students and launched the free teacher education policy. As a new formed special group, free teacher education student catched people’s attention. Because of the special economic treatment and employment policy, their growth and development has been widespread concerned in the whole country.Based on literature review, this study conducted with free teacher education students as the research object. Taking the teachers’ experimental teaching skills in chemistry as our research topic, we explored the ways of cultivating and improving the teachers’ experimental teaching skills both from the theoretical and practical aspects, by referring to literatures, questionnaire survey, interviews as well as action research methods. Then, a rational and effective chemistry experiment teaching mode was constructed in the middle school.Lots of literatures on teacher education as well as curriculum and teaching theory in chemistry were sorted and analyzed, together with95chemistry teachers in middle schools from Hubei provinces as well as9professors and108free teacher education students in chemistry from Central China Normal University were investigated through questionnaire survey. Morever,6professors together with10middle school teachers were interviewed. From March to June in the year of2011, a36-class-hours courses of chemistry experiment teaching practice was carried out for108third-year undergraduate students in chemistry from four classes in the course of Chemical Experiment Research in Middle Schools in Central China Normal University. Furthermore, a survey and interview were conducted to investigate their teaching practice.It is concluded that middle school teachers as well as free teacher education students in university are below the requirement of the new curriculum both in experimental teaching concepts and skills. Besides, approaches of cultivating these required abilities are lacked seriously. In addition, it is confirmed by our study that there is a significant improvement of the experimental abilities of free teacher education students through the use of the PCK theory guidance, PBL teaching mode as well as cooperative learning approaches by openning the course of Chemical Experiment Research in Middle Schools.