The Current Status of Chemistry Experiment Teaching in Rural Middle Schools and Corresponding Counter Measures

In order to obtain a clear picture of the current status quo of the chemistry experiment teaching in rural under-
developed middle schools, taking the constituent elements of chemistry experiment teaching system as the criterion and the twenty plus teacher participants of the2015 National Training Program(Middle and Western China Program: Teachers Training Team Dispacement Full Time Research Program) as subjects, a survey is conducted by means of questionnaire and interviews. The results show that the idea of experimental teaching has gained wide acceptance yet the schools which success- fully complete all the student experiments and demo-experiments required by the teaching materials are rather few in number (accounting for less than50 percent). Factors restraining their enthusiasm for doing experiments are as follows: the need for
experiment teaching outgrows the improvement of experiment conditions; the teaching hours being too few, no class hours are set aside exclusively for experiment teaching; lab assistants are far from enough, some schools have to arrange other teachers acting as part time lab assistants and the professional proficiency of them is in need of enhancement; the management, evalua- tion and incentive mechanism has not yet been established. Therefore, the managerial staff has to reform their teaching philos- ophy of placing greater emphasis on theories while giving too little attention to practice, and make efforts to improve the evalu- ation and excitation mechanism, improve and renew the means of chemistry experiment, step up efforts of training and cultiva- ting lab assistants, prompt exchanges and cooperation so as to enhance teachers’ proficiency, thus to promote the quality of chemistry experiment teaching in the underdeveloped rural middle schools.