Practical Research On Enhancing Students' Critical Thinking Tendency In High School Biology Experiment Teaching

In a rapidly changing and challenging world that demands knowledge-based competence-development in our students,they need higher order thinking skills.To meet this challenge requires the cultivation of students’ critical thinking skills,which are necessary for analyzing unfamiliar situations.Biology is a natural discipline based on experiments.Nobel Prize winner and famous physicist Ding Zhaozhong put forward that experiments are the basis of natural science and theories are meaningless if they are not proved by experiments.The "Biology Curriculum Standards for General Senior High School(2017 Edition)" also clearly points out the importance of biology experiment teaching in senior high school,which is crucial for students to understand the idea of life and develop scientific thinking.The methods of scientific thinking include logical thinking,critical thinking.However,the survey results of critical thinking status in China are generally not optimistic,indicating that the critical thinking level of Chinese students is not high and there is still a large room for improvement.The research shows that experimental teaching is a fertile ground for cultivating students’ critical thinking Therefore,how to use experimental teaching to cultivate students’ critical thinking is the main content of this study.From the perspective of personality traits,critical thinking is a kind of thinking disposition,which is an attitude that determines whether to use critical thinking or not.Therefore,this research investigates the disposition towards critical thinking of students.This research mainly adopts the method of questionnaire survey to investigate the cultivation status of disposition towards critical thinking of senior high school students in Nanjing.The California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory(CCTDI)to investigate the students’ disposition towards critical thinking of seven dimensions,the result shows that most of the students truth-seeking,systematicity,self-confidence and maturity were negative.Combined with the current situation of lack of openness and inquiry in experimental teaching,and drawing on previous studies on critical thinking training strategies,the following strategies are summarized for cultivating critical thinking in experimental teaching: Setting up a situation to stimulate the awareness of problems,group cooperation to promote thinking collision,inquiry experiment to encourage open thinking,questioning to guide thinking reflection,and the above strategies are applied to practice teaching.Two classes with similar critical thinking level and class situation were selected for the teaching experiment.After one semester,through the investigation and analysis of students’ disposition towards critical thinking before and after teaching practice,it was found that the experimental class had a statistically significant improvement on disposition towards critical thinking than the control class.Experimental classes students’ disposition towards critical thinking have significant increase after teaching practice,specific to each dimension of disposition towards critical thinking analysis shows that,in addition to truth-seeking and maturity,all other dimensions were significantly increased.The number of students with negative disposition towards critical thinking and strong disposition towards critical thinking is decreasing and increasing greatly.However,there was no significant difference between the critical disposition towards critical thinking of the control class and disposition towards critical thinking of each dimension in the pre-test and post-test,and the number of students with negative and strong disposition towards critical thinking did not fluctuate significantly.After class,teachers were interviewed about the classroom effect,and the results showed that the classroom effect was good,students could actively participate in the classroom,and the strategies could be effectively used.Therefore,the integration of critical thinking teaching strategies in experimental teaching can effectively improve students’ disposition towards critical thinking.