Science Curriculum and Implementation in Senior Secondary School

Middle school student attitudes toward science, and their relationships with instructional practices: a survey of Chinese students’ preferred versus actual instruction

“…In our sample, this would mean increasing attitude toward science by reducing the gap between students' preference for cooperative teaching and their actual experience of classroom instruction. This is consistent with current efforts to promote more cooperative and inquiry-oriented instruction in Chinese contexts (Liang, 2017) that has been encouraged by curriculum leaders (MOE, 2011), while also highlighting that the implementation of more student-centered instruction could remain relatively less prevalent than desired (Huang et al, 2016).…”

“…The general format of direct instruction is also sometimes called teacher-centered instruction, and in the US often referred to as "didactic" approaches. This is also consistent with widespread patterns of instruction that are found in Chinese contexts (Huang et al, 2016). It is recognizable when teachers retain the epistemic authority of the class and, in the more extreme examples of this approach, when students remain silent and attentive to the teachers' actions and statements.…”

“…This also suggests that, in general, instruction that provides more social engagement for students may increase their attitudes toward the class. The potential for positive effects of cooperative instruction may be particularly high in classroom settings that are otherwise teachercentered, which could be substantially prevalent in Chinese settings like this (Huang et al, 2016). As the students may be experiencing quite low levels of peer-peer interaction around content, the novelty of more cooperative work may be strongly influential on attitude.…”

“…We can see two possible causes for the lack of a positive effect of constructivistoriented teaching that arise because of this sample and how it differed from Western settings where previous work occurred. First, there is the social context of the Chinese classroom setting in which, like much of East Asia, students would expect more traditional teacher-centered instruction (Huang et al, 2016;Tan, 2012) and may not expect to experience constructivist-oriented teaching. So, the lack of constructivist-oriented teaching may be unrelated to their sense of satisfaction with the class or how this is transferred to the discipline itself because they have little overarching reason to expect it.…”

“…This study is based in the Chinese education context where previous research indicates that teacher-centered, direct instruction is rather more prevalent even as inquiryoriented approaches have been encouraged (Huang, Ding, & Hu, 2016). The reasons for this are multifaceted.…”