Exploring factors behind 10th grade students' performance on an Earth Science transfer test

• Main Authors: Jing-Ye Jhan, 詹京燁
• Other Authors: Chun-Yen Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/47831371501897786898

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 地球科學系 === 99 === In Taiwan, Ministry of Education provided the two curriculum guidelines for high school as "students will be able to apply what they have learned to current life or future" and "students will be able to understand and apply the concepts and principles of Earth Science." However, it depends on "transfer of learning" that students can apply what they have learned effectively in new contexts. Therefore, this study developed an Earth science transfer test for three purposes: (1) Exploring factors behind 10th grade students’ performance on an Earth Science transfer test. (2) Categorizing the students in accordance with their performance on an Earth Science transfer test for discussing the differences between each factor in different types. (3) Studying whether rote learning is a factor obstructing the generation of transfer. According to the purposes as mentioned above, three test tools were developed, and two other test tools were used. They are the Prior Knowledge Test, the General Situation Test, the Transfer Situation Test, the Earth Science Periodical Exam and Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM). The test context of the General Situation Test, which we gave, is the same as the context of Earth Science teaching materials in Taiwan at high school level. (For example, the moon’s tide-generating force is greater than the sun’s tide-generating force.) In contrast, the test context of the Transfer Situation Test is different from the context of the teaching materials. (For example, the sun’s tide-generating force is greater than the moon’s tide generating force.) In this study, participants are the 10th grade students of a national senior high school in Tainan (n=186). The Pearson product-moment correlation, multiple linear regression and Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test have been used. The scores on the Transfer Situation Test was identified with a dependent variable in this study, and the scores on the other four tests were identified with independent variables. The research results are as follows: (1) This study discovered that the General Situation Test has the greatest influence on students’ performance on the Transfer Situation Test, and a large effect size was reached. (2) The students who get scores respectively on the General Situation Test and on the Transfer Situation test both higher than the mean scores get the best performance on the other three tests. The opposite group gets the lowest scores on the three tests. (3) This study discovered that when part of students answered the questions which contain the main concepts they had ever learned, transfer was obstructed because of rote learning. However, when they answered the other question which contains the main concept they had not learned, there was no such a phenomenon.