Status of Integrated Science Instruction in Junior Secondary Schools of China: An exploratory study

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed the gradual implementation of integrated science curriculum at the junior secondary level in China. However, in most provinces of China, the implementation is not as successful as expected. Challenges were reported, yet without fine-grained investigation, with respect to science teachers' instruction on integrated science. In this study, we aim to detect major problems by investigating the instruction of integrated science at the secondary level. Classroom observation focused on the teacher and student verbal behavior, teachers' competency of instructional organization, their presentation of instructional content, and the organization of learning activities. Findings revealed that students were provided with limited opportunities for participating and engaging in learning as science teachers were dominant in classroom talk. Teachers emphasized on the integration of knowledge within one subject (within-subject knowledge), but not the integration of knowledge between subjects (cross-subject knowledge), resulting in the unsuccessful instruction of the integrative content. What is more, teachers were inadequately competent in designing and delivering science, technology and society content, scientific inquiry and scientific experiments, which also affected the quality of instruction on integrated science.

Keywords:

• Integrated science curriculum
• Classroom observation
• Science teachers

Acknowledgements

This research is a part of work from the project: the Pillar Project in Humanities and Social Sciences: the Research on the Transformation of Science Education in China (Project #: 07JJD880232) at East China Normal University. The project is funded by the Ministry of Education of China. We would like to thank our team members Xiaonan Wang, Shuai Lou, Shipeng Wang, and the science teachers and students from our collaborating schools for working with us. The first author would like to thank her colleagues Yanjie Song, Yun Wen and Yu Wei at Learning Sciences Lab of National Institute of Education in Singapore for their valuable comments on paper revision.

Notes

1. In this article, integrated science refers to the science curriculum which is taught in junior secondary schools. The original name of the integrated science was Natural Science in China, which merged the domain knowledge from the scope of biology, physics, chemistry and geography. In 2001, curriculum reform, the name of Natural Science was changed to Science (Sun, 2010).

2. The textbooks used at the beginning of New China were mostly translations of textbooks from other countries (e.g. Soviet Union). The curriculum had a lot of foreign input. Then a department of People's Education Press took the charge of developing and publishing textbooks for primary schools and secondary schools. During this period ‘One Syllabus and One Textbook’ was dominant. From 1987, following a series of policies the national government published, the researchers and teachers in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Guangdong, started to develop textbooks by themselves. Different versions of textbooks were thus developed and used in different provinces. It was defined as the period of ‘One Syllabus and Multiple Textbooks’ in China (Zhong, 2009).

3. According to the report of the investigation of science education in China in 2003, integrated science had been covered in all of the junior secondary schools in 13 out of 34 provinces since the start of the 2001 curriculum reform. Approximately 526,000 students participated in this curriculum (Pan, 2005).

4. In China, because the lower status of the integrated science existed for long time, there were few universities that established the major of science education for educating and training pre-service teachers for integrated science before 2001. Therefore, most of the current integrated science teachers specialize in narrow areas within the domain of science, such as biology, chemistry, physics, biology, biochemistry, etc. Thus, in this article, teachers' subject specialism refers to their major or academic background in universities before they become a formal integrated science teacher in secondary schools.

5. In most parts of China, secondary schools are generally rated as ordinary schools and key schools. In the key schools, most teachers have more sophisticated teaching skills and richer working experience compared to those who teach students in the ordinary schools. The students admitted to the key schools should achieve higher scores of entrance examination than those accepted by ordinary schools. The number of the ordinary secondary schools is much more than the key secondary schools in the same area. So the participants from ordinary secondary school can better represent most of teachers in the same area.