At the third meeting of the whole church, our government put forward more clearly that we should implement quality education in an all-round way and strengthen the cultivation of scientific quality of primary and secondary school students based on the great goal of improving the scientific quality of the whole nation. From a global perspective, the goal of science education in middle schools is also determined to improve people's scientific quality, that is, to cultivate people with scientific quality.
There are four core factors in scientific quality, namely: first, the understanding of science and technology, including the understanding of its essence, concept, principle and process; Second, the understanding of the relationship between science, technology and society; Third, scientific spirit and attitude; Fourth, the ability to use science and technology to solve daily life and social problems, including the ability to use scientific methods, the ability to judge and make decisions, the ability to cooperate and communicate with others, and the ability to self-supplement and continue learning.
The author believes that the cultivation of scientific quality is the overall behavior and systematic engineering of education, and it is necessary to implement the concept of quality education in the overall system of education, and adjust the structure on the premise of this concept and goal, so that education can realize the function and effect of quality education as a whole. As one of the components of the whole education system, science education bears the concept of scientific quality education and the specific goal of understanding science.
Understanding science is the basic component of scientific quality and occupies a very important position. The understanding of science consists of four parts, including the understanding of the nature of science, the understanding of scientific process, the understanding of scientific methods and the understanding of scientific objects.
Understanding the nature of science helps to distinguish between science and non-science, science and pseudoscience, and is the basic composition of scientific quality. The demarcation standard of science is intended to distinguish between science and non-science or anti-science, science and metaphysics. Its demarcation standard shows the essential difference between science and non-science or anti-science, science and metaphysics, and becomes an important basis for scientific judgment. In the view of logical empiricism, science is a language system or proposition system that systematizes the empirical facts obtained from observation and experiment. Whether a proposition is meaningful or not establishes a boundary. Any proposition that can finally be proved by experience is meaningful, otherwise it is meaningless. Logical empiricism uses this standard to distinguish science from non-science. Following logical empiricism, Popper, a famous British philosopher of science, replaced confirmation with falsification. Testability is a necessary condition of science, and it is not science without testability. However, this condition alone cannot become science. The reason why science is science lies not only in its empirical testability, but also in the fact that science has formed an internally consistent and logically complete theoretical system. In contrast, the school of social history pays more attention to the latter. For example, Kuhn, the representative of this school, once suggested that whether there is a paradigm is the demarcation standard between science and non-science and pre-science. Paradigm is a sign of scientific maturity. Any discipline is not scientific until a common paradigm is formed, and only after a unified paradigm is formed can it develop from former science to science. The core of Kuhn's paradigm is scientific theory. It can be seen that science, as a reflection of the essential structure of natural phenomena, its knowledge system has the structure of empirical knowledge theory, while scientific standards have the dual structure of empirical theory. A correct understanding of the nature of science is the first condition for understanding science.
There are three dimensions to the understanding of scientific process. First, knowledge is a process, and truth is also a process. Secondly, this process is a process of exploration, there is no inevitable road to success, and there is no stylized logic of scientific discovery. Thirdly, through the case teaching of history of science, students can "reproduce" the whole process from topic selection to scientific research. Understanding the scientific process is conducive to cultivating students' inquiry consciousness, cultivating students' inquiry ability and stimulating their innovative potential.
There are two scientific methods: empirical method and logical method. According to the hierarchy, it can be divided into general methods (principle methods), general scientific methods and specific scientific methods. Scientific method is an important part of natural science, and the great progress of natural science often comes from the innovation of research methods. Scientific research method education is an indispensable part of ability and quality training.
Understanding the object of natural science research-nature is the ultimate goal of scientific research and the fundamental goal of learning. The purpose of human scientific research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of nature. Nature is a whole, it exists and is recognized as a whole. The unity of nature determines the integrity of human cognition. We can't really understand nature without understanding it as a whole, or without obtaining a holistic view of nature. Natural science is a whole, and its branches are formed due to the lack of human cognitive ability and the limitation of natural understanding. Because all disciplines have formed their own understanding of nature from different aspects, the natural picture they provide is isolated and incomplete. In order to make students form a real understanding of nature, it is necessary to cultivate a holistic view of nature, and the comprehensive course of science education will undertake this mission.
The goal of science education constitutes the core of scientific quality training, which has more specific contents. This subject should play an important role in the modern education system.
Second, the transformation of educational paradigm.
The realization of the goal of science education leads to the transformation of educational paradigm, which is determined by two factors. First, the angle of understanding science has changed, and second, the way of understanding science has changed.
Modern science education refers to a comprehensive science and technology education system with physics, chemistry, biology and geology as the main subjects, involving technology, environmental science, life science and history of science. Starting from the whole of science and technology, we should understand science and know all branches of the discipline. From 1940s to 1960s, with the rise and development of systems science, the way people look at the world has changed, and the angle of understanding science has also changed. Western science is a model of modern science, which not only brings great achievements in scientific understanding, but also affects human beings with its penetrating methods, spirits and ways of thinking. Since ancient Greece, the distinctive analytical thinking mode of western science is to seek a detailed and accurate understanding of the part from the part, and expect to form an understanding of the whole on the basis of fully understanding the part. This way of thinking has brought the accuracy and rigor of western scientific research and made great achievements. However, with the study of complex objects in the 20th century, the limitations of this analytical thinking mode began to appear.
With the establishment of system science, system method has been established as a new way of thinking. Since the 1960s, people began to look at science from a systematic perspective. With the rise of sociology of science, people began to study and understand science in a broader space-the big system of science, technology and society. Looking at science from the perspective of system, it emphasizes the integrity of the system and the correlation of system elements. Compared with analytical thinking mode, holistic thinking mode is more dialectical.
The development of modern science has also led to a change in the way people understand science, from paying attention to the static structure of science to the process of scientific understanding.
Since the establishment of natural science, the research of scientific outlook has experienced the changing process of static structure view, dynamic development view and reasonable progress view. From Bacon to logical empiricism, the research of scientific outlook mainly focuses on the static analysis of "finished products" of scientific activities. Logical empiricism gives a static description of science from a rational point of view, and explains the growth of scientific knowledge with induction as the basic method. In such a scientific picture, once confirmed, scientific knowledge becomes truth, knowledge is the collection of truth, and knowledge is enriched by accumulation. Science is like a tributary that flows into a river and advances in a continuous way and accumulation mode. In the process of changing the core problem of scientific view from the static structure of scientific knowledge to the dynamic development of scientific knowledge, Popper made an important historical contribution. He was the first to put forward the dynamic model of scientific development, which pointed out a new direction different from logical empiricism for the study of scientific view. Popper's work is of great significance. As S.Toulmin pointed out, "When we really treat the ever-changing organization of scientific theory with a developmental attitude, philosophical exploration will have a new direction. This step will force people to look at all theoretical structures and propositional systems of science from a broader historical background. In this new relationship, natural science is no longer a static formal structure, but a rational cause with a certain standard ideological procedure or trend. " Understanding what science is and its structure constitutes the main content of scientific static research, and investigating the evolution and progress of science constitutes the main content of scientific dynamic research. These two aspects of research are necessary for understanding science. The static research of science formally describes some important characteristics of science through structure, while the dynamic research of science shows some laws of scientific evolution from the change of its structural relationship.
The goal of science education is to understand science. Since the 20th century, the rapid development of science has changed our perspective and way of understanding science. This change has led to the change of the original educational model and concept, which not only changes the scope of education from the cultivation of knowledge and methods limited to a single scientific scope to the high integration of multiple disciplines, but also shows science from a dynamic perspective, which is very conducive to the cultivation of students' inquiry consciousness and ability and the stimulation of innovation potential.