RESEARCH ON THE EVALUATION OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY ABILITY BASED ON VIRTUAL DESIGN PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS——TAKING THE VIRTUAL DESIGN PHYSICS EXPERIMENT OF COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY AS AN EXAMPLE
Scientific inquiry skills are an important indicator of scientific literacy,and the cul-tivation of such skills has become a core concept in current international science education re-form efforts.Physics curriculum standards explicitly require the development of scientific in-quiry and university-level physics laboratory skills.However,the current evaluation system for scientific inquiry ability demonstrated in"design-based physics experiments"is not com-plete.Therefore,this study constructed a scientific inquiry ability evaluation scale and a struc-tural equation model based on virtual design-based physics experiments.The model achieved stand-ards in validity and rationality.At the same time,corresponding weights were assigned to each di-mension of scientific inquiry ability based on the model fitting results.Empirical research based on this model indicated that there were significant differences in scientific inquiry ability between students of different genders,but no significant differences were found among students of different grades.In addition,the existing knowledge level of students had a significant moderating effect on the"analysis and reasoning"dimension of scientific inquiry ability.