An Experimental Study On Teaching Evolutionary Trees Based On Mental Rotation In Primary Science Education

Evolution is an important concept in biology.Understanding the evolutionary tree will help students understand the process of biological evolution and the relationship between species.And it also promote the improvement of students’ scientific literacy.Therefore,evolutionary tree is the core tool to learn evolution,which can help students learn evolutionary knowledge and form a systematic knowledge system.At present,learning and use of evolutionary trees have been carried out in foreign primary schools,while there is little research on the importance of evolutionary trees in learning evolution in China.The compulsory education science curriculum standard contains the biological inheritance,evolution,diversity and other evolutionary views.Evolutionary tree can be used to help explain and organize them.Moreover,The compulsory education science curriculum standard also attaches importance to students’ acquisition of scientific methods in the learning process.As an important tool in biology,the process of students’ learning and using the evolutionary tree is the process of learning and using scientific research tools and methods.However,the premise of using evolutionary tree is that students can read evolutionary tree and have a certain cognition level of evolutionary tree.This study hopes to design an effective evolutionary tree teaching that can be implemented in primary school to help students learn to interpret the evolutionary tree.Based on the study of evolutionary tree and teaching theory,this study found that the students’ mental rotation ability has a certain effect on the comparative the evolutionary tree.While,the teaching goal of evolutionary tree based on mental rotation in primary school,teaching content that consists of three modules,and teaching activities were designed.In order to verify the effectiveness of teaching evolutionary trees based on mental rotation in primary school,this study adopted the experimental model of before and after test of single factor group,designed the experimental group and the control group.The teaching experiment was carried out in grade 5 and grade6 of two primary schools in Fuzhou.And evolutionary tree teaching was conducted for the experimental group.In the pre-test,a significant difference was found in a pair of experimental group and control group.In order to effectively analyze the effect of evolutionary tree teaching,this study selected two pairs of experimental group and control group with no significant difference in the pre-test.The results showed that: after the experimental intervention in the experimental group that is evolutionary tree teaching based on mental rotation,the overall results or each module of the post-test were significantly higher than the results of the pre-test.And the pre-test and post-test results of the control group which hasn’t experimental intervention were not significantly changed.In the post-test,the overall or each module results of the experimental group were significantly higher than those of the control group.On the premise that there was no significant statistical difference between the experimental group and the control group,the improvement of the experimental group indicated that the cognition level of evolutionary tree increased significantly in grade 5 and grade 6.This shows that the teaching content of evolutionary tree teaching based on mental rotation in primary school conforms to the cognition of grade 5-6 students,and the design and organization of teaching activities can achieve effective results..In this study,evolutionary tree teaching based on mental rotation in primary school is designed to help students understand and learn to interpret evolutionary tree.However,as a teaching tool,evolutionary tree needs to be further studied in primary science education to help students understand evolution.