Most of the students (aged 13–15) in Chinese middle schools study specialized science curricula rather than an integrated science curriculum. Those curricula, which predominantly cover physics, chemistry, and biology, were set out in Science Curricula Standards (SCS), published by the Ministry of Education of China (MoEoC) in 2001.
Inspired by the US National Science Education Standards (NSES), SCS promoted inquiry-based science learning. The goal was to ensure that students understand the core ideas of science rather than simply acquire facts related to those ideas. In 2002 science teachers in China (mostly teachers of physics, chemistry, and biology) were provided with nationwide training in the new approach. They spent one to two days in sessions sponsored by the publishers of new textbooks based on SCS.
That first attempt at implementing inquiry-based science was unsuccessful. So, eight years after the first training session, MoEoC sponsored a second nationwide initiative and called it the National Teacher Training Project (NTTP). A revised version of SCS followed a year later in 2011.
The NTTP sessions aim to improve professional development of middle school science teachers by providing them with more extensive and higher-quality learning opportunities in science and science education, especially in inquiry-based science teaching. To lead the implementation of NTTP in physics, MoEoC chose Soochow University, which was founded in 1900 and is one of China’s top universities. The teacher training scheme that we developed at Soochow University is the subject of this article. Now in its fourth year, the scheme has graduated about 1400 teachers from all over China and has proven popular and effective.
Why did the first attempt fail?
When SCS was first adopted, approximately half the science teachers in China's middle schools still transferred knowledge to their students by writing on blackboards and reciting what they had written. Nevertheless, it was encouraging that the other half were at least trying to design courses based on students’ own sense of scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, many of those courses were neither scientific nor practical.
For example, students either did too few experiments or they conducted experiments without using reasoning to discover the laws of science for themselves. Some Chinese science teachers misunderstood the nature of scientific inquiry and could not therefore lead their students through inquiry-based learning.
The most recent draft of the US Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) promotes a practice-oriented approach to inquiry-based science learning and is guided by the 2011 US National Research Council framework for K-12 science education. The recommended practices include asking questions and defining problems, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, using mathematics and computational thinking, constructing explanations and designing solutions, engaging in argument from evidence, and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. Because the practices emphasize both doing and reasoning, NGSS provided us with guidance on how to help Chinese science teachers understand and implement inquiry-based learning.
Another source of inspiration were views of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. According to Piaget and Kuhn, the difficulties encountered by scientists in their research resemble those encountered by students in their learning. Scientists benefit from belonging to a scientific community, where they can develop concepts or models within a recognized intellectual framework. It follows that science teachers could derive similar benefits by building and joining in a learning community based on scientific exploration. If they belonged to such a community, teachers could imbue their students with the ability to reason and to make sense of the findings in ways that are consistent with currently accepted scientific understanding and practice.
Evidence shows that teachers can design effective inquiry-based science courses—provided that they receive the right training. What is the right training? NSES argued that teachers should take courses in which they learn science through inquiry, just like the students they will be teaching. We agree.
There are about 562 900 active science teachers in Chinese middle schools. Approximately 557 700 of them—0.9% of the total—lack a master's degree or higher. What those middle school teachers learn as undergraduates is therefore crucial to their future careers. As is the case in the US and Canada, undergraduate education in China is comprehensive. A student who intends to become a science teacher will complete courses not only in science, but also in politics, foreign languages, pedagogy, curriculum development, and the didactics of science.
Unfortunately, the structure of a student's initial training in science education is quite rigid. Most of the courses typically communicate science or pedagogy as a body of facts and rules to be memorized, rather than as a way of knowing about the natural world. Undergraduates who go through such training seldom, if ever, undergo training in scientific inquiry.
New science teachers do receive additional training before they take up their positions, but that training usually focuses on the statutes that govern teaching in China, such as the Law of Teachers and the Law of Compulsory Education of the People’s Republic of China. There was no concept of teacher’s professional development in China until 1998, when the first master’s degree courses in education were established. For those reasons, most active science teachers in middle schools have received no training in inquiry-based learning.
National Teacher Training Project
Inquiry-based learning is a feature of NTTP, which MoEoC has sponsored since 2010. The program’s annual budget of around $90 million covers training for active teachers at elementary, middle, and high schools. Teacher professional development is supported through teacher advisers, coaches, and resource specialists.
The programs of NTTP are divided into lead teacher training and the local teacher training. Lead teachers, of whom there are 68 700 to date, return to university, where they receive 15 days of training in science education and are taught how to pass on what they learned to other teachers in their localities. About 100 000 teachers have received 10–15 days of local training given by lead teachers and university professors.
In 2012, to further improve teachers’ professional development, MoEoC created a set of standards for middle schools, namely: National Standards for Professional Development for Teachers; Lead Physics Teacher Training Standards of the NTTP; and Lead Biology Teacher Training Standards of the NTTP. The two lead science teacher training standards have three components:
- 1. Professional philosophy and morality, which includes such topics as educational morality and family-school cooperation.
- 2. Professional knowledge, which includes such topics as inquiry-based science teaching, the frontiers of science, and the analysis of difficult problems in middle school science courses.
- 3. Professional competence, which includes such topics as embedding experiments in courses, guiding inquiry-based science learning, and online instruction.
An effective science teacher training scheme
In our view, the conventional approach to professional development for active teachers needs to shift from information transfer and technical training to intellectual growth. To be effective, training schemes should be based heavily on investigations, in which teachers have direct contact with phenomena, gather and interpret data using appropriate technology, and work in groups on real, open-ended problems. In other words, science teachers should acquire the same skills as research scientists.
In the scheme we developed at Soochow University, we required trainees to:
- • Study science history to understand science inquiry.
- • Research the classic experiments of middle school science curricula to improve their ability to design their own inquiry-based lessons.
- • Investigate the challenges of science and its teaching, supervised by scientists or educational psychologists.
- • Research cases of good and bad science instruction.
- • Provide inquiry-based science lessons in our partner middle schools and report on their experiences.
In addition to designing a set of courses, we built a partnership among Soochow University, the Physics Teaching Research Institute of Suzhou, and several middle schools in the city. The partnership involves physicists and educational psychologists from Soochow University and the University of Science and Technology of China, physics teachers from the top middle schools of China, and the best of our previous trainees. Our web site, http://www.jspx.suda.edu.cn, provides a forum for trainers and trainees, lectures from top physicists, demonstrations of middle school physics experiments, papers or reports of trainees, guidance on teaching, plans of teacher training, short films of excellent lessons and hands-on activities, and virtual labs.
To make sure our physics teachers clearly understand inquiry-based learning, we compiled a training manual based on 63 classic physics teaching experiments that are used in middle school classrooms, such as Galileo Galilei’s pendulum experiment in Pisa, Otto von Guericke’s low-pressure water boiling experiment, and Andrew Millikan’s oil-drop experiment. In the manual, we explain how earlier physicists designed, performed, and revised those same experiments for the first time. We also describe the assumptions those physicists made before they did their experiments and the differences between the original experiments and the modern versions taught in school.
As an example, one of the trainees made a water lens from a section of plastic pipe, a plain ultra-thin condom, a syringe without a pinhead and a section of flexible pipe. The focal length of the water lens can be adjusted by pumping water in or out to make the lens thicker or thinner. A description of the device, which can be used to examine human eyes, was published in Chinese Physics Teacher.
To summarize, we believe that science is best learned through inquiry and that science teachers who nurture and guide their students’ scientific inquiries should themselves have taken inquiry-based courses. Our training scheme at Soochow University follows those principles with great success.
Xiaoyong Mu is a professor at Soochow University in Suzhou, China. He is also a director of China's Science Education Council and of the Curriculum Council of China's Education Society. He served as one the of chief advisers to the National Teacher Training Project of China. He designed and led the Lead Physics Teacher Training Scheme of the NTTP (for middle schools) at Soochow University. You can contact him by email at [email protected]. Qian Xiong is a professor at Suzhou University of Science and Technology. Quan Wang teaches at Nantong University, in Nantong, China.
