STEM Education Practice Based On Middle School Physical Experiments

The exploration of STEM education in America started early.After achieving some effects,other countries began to study and imitate its example,including China.In 2015,Opinions on the Promotion of Educational Information-based Work in the Period of the 13 th Five-Year Plan(Draft for Soliciting Opinions)issued by the Ministry of Education clearly pointed out: “Make effective use of information technology to promote the construction of ‘mass maker space”,explore STEM education,maker education and other new education modes.” As China’s window,Beijing is exploring into STEM education now.In this context,researches on STEM education appear increasingly important.STEM teaching researches should be implemented in real class.However,it is hard for schools to specially arrange independent STEM courses due to the lack of relevant recourses.Hence,the goal of this research is to figure out a mode integrating STEM education ideas and physical course.The similarity between middle school physical course and STEM education is to cultivate students’ scientific literacy and problem-solving ability.Hence,the author considers that physical experiment is an excellent approach to combine middle school physical course and STEM education.Therefore,based on physical experiments,contents of physical course and STEM education ideas are integrated.Then the integration results are evaluated,the problems and existing difficulties and analyzed,and the improvement methods are figured out.In this way,better integration methods can be found in the future.This thesis adopts literature method,interview method and questionnaire method.Through extracting effective information from literature,research situations and development of the integration of STEM education ideas and physical course are studied,so as to provide theoretical support and practical guidance for the research on the “STEM education practice based on middle school physical experiments”.Through interviewing participating physical teachers,positive feedback of a special-class teacher is obtained.According to the teacher,compared to ordinary physical experiments,those integrating with STEM education ideas can better arouse students’ thinking and cultivate students’ scientific literacy.Then from the questionnaire survey of 28 students in the class,students’ opinions and true feelings about the course are collected.Among the survey results,there is also positive feedback on the course.Students indicate that they are in favor of courses where they can do experiments on their own.In addition,this thesis also provides some methods for STEM teaching by some classroom teaching cases.This research shows that physical experiments integrating with STEM ideas can truly cultivate students’ ability to ponder over problems and enhance their scientific literacy.However,there are also some limits,including the difficulty in acquiring teaching resources,limited class time,students’ indifference to non-college entrance examination subjects due to academic pressure,the difficulty in balancing theoretical knowledge of physical course and STEM practical activities,etc.In order to overcome those limitations and better integrate physical course with STEM education contents,the author proposes three suggestions: physical course should focus on the physical knowledge and be supplemented by STEM education contents;employ out-ofschool experts in STEM education to give training to school teachers;timely collect feedback on class and improve the class contents according to the feedback.