The Effects on Learning of Nervous System Concepts with Graphic Organizer Teaching Strategy for Junior High Students

• Main Authors: YEH, JIH-YUN, 葉季昀
• Other Authors: 楊文金
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30000679167648847713

博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 科學教育研究所 === 93 === The main purpose of this study is to develop a feasible teaching strategy of graphic organizer helping students to make sense of the relationships between concepts of nervous system, and to explore the effects of this strategy on learning for junior high school students. 154 of 7th grade students from a public junior high school of Taipei City were selected as target subjects and divided randomly into two groups, one as experimental group (N=85) treated with the graphic organizer teaching strategy (abbreviated as GO group), and the other as controlled group (N=69) treated with the traditional teaching strategy (abbreviated as TD group). The investigation procedure included the pretest, instruction treatments, the posttest, structured interviews and the delayed test. The instruments of this study involved adapted reading materials, instructional medium and assessment tests. The major results of the study were as follows: 1.There’s no interaction between the variables of “the teaching strategy” and “the academic achievement in the biology subject” on the influences of multiple choice test scores. Further analysis of “the academic achievement in the biology subject” effects showed that whatever the teaching strategy was, students’ performances on the multiple choice test scores were according with their academic achievement in the biology subject. With regard to “the teaching strategy” effects, not only the average scores of the multiple choice posttest but also the average scores of knowledge aspect items of GO group students were significantly higher than those of TD group students. These findings indicated that the graphic organizer teaching strategy could make immediate influences on students’ learning of the concepts on knowledge level. 2.With regard to the recall test of nervous system illustration, it showed that the GO group students performed significantly better than TD group students on the average scores of correct recall of the terms. Besides, GO group students got significant higher scores on certain terms such as “central nervous system, peripheral nervous system, brain, spinal cord, cranial nerve and spinal nerve”. These results indicated that the graphic organizer teaching strategy could help students to memorize the terms with more correctness and to recall those terms that were on much abstract level. 3.The findings of the tree map test revealed that the GO group students performed significantly better on the realization of “the definitions of cranial nerve and spinal nerve”, “the relationships between cranial nerve, spinal nerve and brain, spinal cord”, “the definitions of sensory neuron and motor neuron”, and “the relationships between sensory neuron, motor neuron and cranial nerve, spinal nerve”. 4.The results of the context inference test showed that with regard to the application of specific concepts in making active inferences, the students of GO group got significant higher scores than those of TD group. Furthermore, some of the GO group students could express exactly the relationships of concepts when answering the questions. These findings indicated that those students accepting the graphic organizer teaching strategy might establish more elaborative frameworks of concepts and could have better performances on the quality of concepts realization and application.