Application Research Of Learning Progressions In Key Concepts Teaching Of High School Biology

In recent years,the teaching of key concepts has attracted more and more attention of education researchers both at home and abroad.According to the US “2061” program,students are required to reduce their memory of the isolated facts and concepts,focusing their learning on key concepts.Biology Curriculum Standards of Compulsory Education revised by China’s Ministry of Education in 2011,has made it clear that teachers should pay attention to the learning of important concepts.And they are supposed to focus on key concepts when designing and organizing teaching activities of each unit.Enshan Liu pointed out that “in abundant biological knowledge,the key concept is the one that is easy to select and can meet the requirements of both‘less’ and‘fine’ teaching.” Therefore,in the teaching of subject knowledge,focusing on key concepts to organize teaching activities can not only reduce the burden of students’ learning,but also effectively help students to establish their knowledge frame step by step and enrich their cognitive map.But in practice,some teachers organize teaching activities centering on factual knowledge and let students remember concepts in the way of isolated nouns,instead of attaching importance to the link between concepts,which makes teaching activities inefficient.When they learn the same topic in several semesters,students will follow coherent and typical learning path,which is described as learning progressions,generally presented as a series of interrelated conceptual sequences from simple oneto complex centering on key concepts.Therefore,teaching objectives can be broken down to help students gradually have a deeper understanding of key concepts by organizing teaching of key concepts according to learning progressions.To build learning progressions,we need to determine the start and end points of progressions,and correctly divide the dimension and determine the level of leaning progressions.On the basis of combining theory of learning progressions,construction method and the significance of biology key concepts teaching,this thesis estabish the learning progression of “homeostasis of body”.Analyzing the guiding significance of learning progressions to instructional design,it builds instructional design model based on the learning progression,and designs the instructional case with “immune regulation”as an example.The main research content consists of two parts:The first part of research is to come up with the“homeostasis of body”learning progression,which is divided into three stages.Firstly,put forward learning progression hypothesis.Key concepts that the theme concludes are determined by analyzing the theme of“homeostasis of body”.And relevant concept maps are followed by the dimension of learning progressions.And then it is necessary to divide the level of progressions according to the development level model of scientific concept understanding and bring forward the learning progression hypothesis.Secondly,develop two-stage selection tests to verify whether the learning progressionhypothesis is in accord with the actual performance of students.The reason why we choose it as a measurement tool is that two-stage selection test can guarantee the reliability and validity of the test volume through strict development process.Thirdly,verify learning progression hypothesis.Taking tests comes after the preparation of two-stage selection tests.By analyzing the results of tests,on the one hand we can verify the performance of the students in learning progression hypothesis,and on the other hand we can sort out the common misconceptions of the students.The second part of research focuses on research of teaching design about key concepts based on the learning progression.First of all,having realized existing problems of instructional design,combined with the relevant theory of learning progressions,we analyze the guiding significance of learning progressions on instructional design.And then we put forward the key concept instructional design model based on the learning progressions after analyzing basic paradigm of instructional design.Finally,according to the model,we design instructional cases taking “immune regulation”as an example and analyze the guiding advantages of the model to instructional design.The main results of the research can be divided into three parts.First,try to analyze key concepts from the perspective of learning progressions and build learning progressions of key concepts.We establish learning progressions of four core concepts including“Internal environment”,“Neural regulation”,“Body fluid regulation”and“immune regulation” by coming up with learning progression hypothesis →developing two-stage selection tests →verifying learning progression hypothesis.And combining students’ common misconception in the process of learning these key conceptions,we provide the basis for instructional design and evaluation.Second,set up the key concept instructional design model based on the learning progression.Third,take instructional case,“ immune regulation”as an example based on the model.