Pupils Explore Course Development Of Ill-structured Problem-solving Ability

In knowledge economy era, the cultivation of students’ innovative ability and problem-solving ability is the target of a new round of curriculum reform. As a theory of applying information technology to innovating and learning,"Knowledge Building" theory has experienced20years of development, and has been applied in a number of countries and regions to multiple subject teaching fields. However, there is no practical use of this theory in Chinese mainland classroom teaching. In this paper,"knowledge building" theory is applied to the scientific inquiry process which the primary school curriculum standard is laying stress on. Through the application of KB theory in STS courses to explore how the children’s ill-structured problem-solving ability develops during the development process in a Nanjing primary school.On the basis of the basic theory of the problem-solving process and the actual implementation process of the inquiry lesson, ill-structured problem-solving ability in knowledge building teaching is divided into three dimensions. They are the abilities to represent problem, to design and implementation programs, to reflect and evaluate. Classroom observation and student interviews are adopted as the main research methods. The data can be collected from the classroom video, audio, or Knowledge Forum. The relevant data analysis on the inquiry lesson which formed by three stages found that: Individually, students in the same stage show certain differences on different competence factors, and the differences mainly are caused by students’ original knowledge, cognitive ability and learning ability; On the whole, after one term learning guided by knowledge building theory, the average level of students’ill-structured problem solving ability is gradually rising with the pass of time. Students had experienced three stages of development: low levels of problem solving, basic problem solving, perfect reasoning and thinking.Meanwhile, this paper also proposes several strategies to promote students’ problem-solving capacity. These strategies can help teachers to put KB theory into practice with a certain amount of guidance to deepen knowledge building learning and to carry out inquiry class sophisticatedly.