INTRODUCTION
Exercise physiology is a branch discipline of the human physiology, the research
object of this discipline is on the physiological and functional alterations
of human body in one training or exercise activity (acute training) or long-term
repeating exercise activity (chronic training) Wang and Hua
(2007). This discipline is an important professional basic theoretical course
for the majors of physical education and social sports. With the changes of
contemporary sports values from overheating medal competition competitive sports
to promoting the public health of the national fitness, from the service productivity
to focusing on common person’s life, the curriculum of exercise physiology
has also changed from simple basic theoretical discipline to the practical course
(Tu, 2009). However, it has to face the current situation
of the course with multiple contents which are related with the basic knowledge
of human physiology, human anatomy, biochemistry and athletic training and other
multi-disciplinary knowledge, the teaching contents are very abundant, theoretical
and complicated. The traditional teaching pattern which is teacher-centered,
does not accommodate with the features of this course. In the teacher-centered
teaching mode, the teaching effect is not very well and the students become
very difficulty to read and learn the teaching materials. At the same time,
the teaching time is greatly reduced with the adjustment of the teaching plan
of this course. Hence, there present a prominent contradiction between the multiple
teaching contents and the reduced teaching time. Also, colleges or universities
are quite limited to equip the teaching devices for those theory courses in
sports major. All of these factors are made to lower the teaching effects of
this course.
In the present stage, the teaching pattern for exercise physiology course in
colleges and universities is still in the stage of exploration and improve.
The traditional teaching pattern and means are emphasized to teach knowledge
according to the books or teaching materials in the classroom and the teachers
or professors exert as the center role. The traditional classroom teachers impart
knowledge to all students and all students are passive, the dominate position
of students is flooded. This education pattern makes students only accept what
the teacher teaches and answer what the teacher asks. As a result, students
are always passive learning. Hence, the traditional teaching pattern ignores
to cultivate of student's independent learning, exploring and thinking ability.
Moreover, the students would be lack of critical thought, imagination and innovation
ability as long as they face some practical problems. Inquiry teaching which
is student-centered, the goal of this teaching pattern is to make students learn
in the means of scientific inquiry (Jiang and Luo, 2011).
It requires teachers to create a teaching environment which is similar to scientific
research or scientific explorative process. The goal of this process is to train
their scientific attitude and scientific spirit, to improve students' thinking
ability and innovation ability (Ma, 2010). Teachers
should provide environments to support the student’s inquiry learning activities.
With the increasingly popularity of internet, it is affected student’s
study and everyday life. Using internet, it can improve students’ subjectivity
of learning. The internet with the advantages of openness, interactivity, sharing,
hypermedia and large capacity, those provide favorable conditions to develop
and promote the research-oriented teaching pattern. Internet and research-oriented
teaching pattern can be complementary each other, promote the research-oriented
teaching of exercise physiology course to be carried on effectively.
CURRENT SITUATION OF EXERCISE PHYSIOLOGY TEACHING PATTERN
Exercise physiology as one of the backbone course of physical education or
sports major in the colleges or universities, it is paid a high attention whether
teachers or students. However, it is not so optimistic as a matter of fact,
the reasons are originated from various aspects, the mainly limitations are
about the teaching conditions, teaching means, the educational system and other
related factors such as students’
attitude and teachers’ initiatives.
Due to the limitations of teaching conditions, multimedia teaching style is
still the only simple teaching means. The advantages of this style are convenient
to imparting a large amount of teaching contents in a short time for teachers
but the limitations are very obviously, it can only teach knowledge from books
or teaching materials, not effectively motivate the students' learning initiative
and innovative thinking. But there are so many contents with theoretical and
abstract knowledge of exercise physiology and the contents are not ease to be
understood and mastered by students, such as neural electrophysiological phenomenon,
the molecular mechanism of cardiac muscle contraction work, the basic principle
and the regulation of neuroendocrine on muscle motor function and so on. As
a teacher, if you can not deal with those problems appropriately, the students
will gradually appear to feel monotonous in the class and it is difficulty to
achieve good teaching effects.
POSSIBILITY OF RESEARCH-ORIENTED TEACHING BASED ON THE INTERNET
Wealthy of network learning materials cause students to seek knowledge:
In the internet environment, there are lots of resources on exercise physiology,
including all kinds of Bulletin Broad Systems (BBS), coursewares, electronic
books and related journals and scientific news. Some of these resources are
belongs to special sports science BBS, such as http://www.vo2max.com.cn/
and some are attributed to comprehensive BBS, such as http://www.soudoc.com/bbs/index.php,http://www.dxy.cn/
and http://emuch.net/bbs/.
At the foreign country, there are also many other websits or associations with
kinds of exercise physiology resources. Such as International Federation of
Sports Medicine (FIMS), American Medical Society of Sports Medicine (AMSSM).
At the same time, exercise physiology is a branch of physiology, information
or knowledge related with human physiology is more abundant. Students can ask
some problems on the Internet for help directly, usually, they can acquire the
satisfying explains or answers from the internet.
Independent study cause to motivate the learning enthusiasm: Equality
of virtual network space, make the traditional relationship between the teachers
and students completely changed. Traditionally, it is teacher-centered, students
passively accept knowledge from teachers. This kind of teaching mode is changed
with the help of internet which is one-to many. The one-to-many teaching style
cannot satisfy the demand of student individual character, that is to say that
students are lack of effective communication channel with teachers or with other
students (Zhang and Zhang, 2003). However, in the internet
environment, the virtual network has provided a broad platform for discussing
or studying exercise physiology questions or problems as group and it has also
built a smooth channel for communicating or interacting equally between students
and teachers. Moreover, with the help of internet platform, persons who involve
to discuss the exercise physiology questions or problems, will not limit whether
the students who are learning or teachers who are teaching exercise physiology
knowledge. So, it will have the questions discussed more extensive and deeper.
In this platform, the position of teachers is equal to students’, this
kind of teaching mode is benefit to make a change from teacher-centered teaching
style to student-centered learning pattern and it is in favor of improving the
ability of autonomous learning for students.
Keep pace with the times of research-oriented teaching pattern: Network
as one of the most widely communication platform, has been dug into various
aspects of people's life. Using of the internet platform to promote the research-oriented
teaching activity, teachers can solve many problems which are not easy to be
solved by traditional teaching means. The network platform including personal
bokee, twitter, BBS, QQ, E-mail et al. provides a good environment for
teachers to carry out their research-based teaching activity. Fully using the
internet platform, teachers can accurately grasp the teaching contents to carry
out the research-oriented teaching activity and evaluate the teaching effect.
In this environment, teachers can create some problems which need students to
study and explore by means of research-oriented teaching activity. After then,
students are required to fulfill their tasks which are selected by themselves
according to the demands of the research-oriented teaching. Students then make
full use kinds of resources by library or on internet to carry out their exercise
physiological topics, they can make relevant social investigation and practice,
interviews or other research activities to answer their questions. Resources
on the internet are rich and varied, on some hot physiological questions, usually,
there are special websites offering some special information, such as the changes
of blood pressure in the four chamber of the heart in the cardiac cycle, many
websites offer pictures and images to vividly show the changes of blood pressure
and exhibit their relationship with the cardiac cycle. This kind of teaching
mode can avoid students learning by rote and deepen students to understand their
knowledge, motivate their learning interests.
CONSTRUCTION OF RESEARCH-ORIENTED TEACHING PATTERN BASED ON THE INTERNET
ENVIRONMENT FOR EXERCISE PHYSIOLOGY COURSE
Research-oriented teaching pattern need to keep the teaching contents with
the feature of uniqueness, comprehensiveness, openness and practicability. It
should pay more attention to collect the data according to problems, after discussing
among classmates or between teachers and students, the conclusion will come
to be draw. In this process, the research-oriented teaching pattern is realized
with the help of the internet (Bai et al., 2009).
Because of the internet with the convenience, interactive, space and time-free,
resources with the advantage of universality and richness, this provides a convenient
environment to create a new open learning approach to research-oriented teaching.
Internet extends the time and space for teaching and learning, so it is very
important condition to realize this teaching mode. The purpose of research-oriented
teaching is to change the position of students passive learning identified knowledge
which is from teaching materials. Teachers build an open learning platform,
offering the opportunity to acquire knowledge from multi-channel and to apply
their knowledge, so as to improve the students' ability to solve some actual
problems. Besides, the research-oriented teaching pattern needs to change the
current evaluation systems which are centered by students’ test or examination
(Ma, 2010). This change requires the focus of teaching
and learning is no longer acquisition of knowledge passively and the students
need to learn how to acquire their necessary knowledge, how to apply of their
knowledge, so as to make students independent thinking and with the ability
of autonomous learning.
Solving the practical problems as essential requirements of the research-orient
teaching pattern: The research-oriented teaching pattern of exercise physiology
course requires that teachers should design some topics or questions with scientific
value or arousing students’ interest
according to the basic theory and basic concept in the teaching material and
students can build or design some research topics according to the teacher's
question. In this process, it may be tedious and boring of research-oriented
teaching for teachers and students. In this stage, teachers must deliver the
theoretical knowledge and learning means to students, teachers must implement
some flexible teaching patterns and make full use of network resources, so as
to meet the research-oriented teaching demand and fulfill the teaching task.
Moreover, teachers should apply various channels or styles to solve some problems
which are met by students during the research learning, such as discussion,
investigation and interviews and other practices. Other communication channels
with students such as video conference, animation teaching and multimedia course
are also very effective. At the stage of creating some scientific problems for
research-oriented teaching, the internet can also help students create a virtual
classroom environment from collecting rich background materials, experts’
lecture materials and some other valuable data. Students can also determine
their research subjects with the teacher provided questions or confused problems
combined with the previously learned knowledge.
Group discussing as the basic style of the research-orient teaching pattern:
The implementation of the research-oriented teaching pattern should build the
special interest group. Modern social division of labor is more and more clear,
the completion of a task usually need to work in coordination and also, the
spirits of coordination are also the important aspect of modern well-rounded
quality education system. In the research-oriented teaching pattern, the students
can solve their problems in coordination around their interest topics. First
of all, because of the different sports physiology knowledge of students, it
can activate students to master more previous relevant basic knowledge and theory
with discussion or argumentation, so as to link between the current research
questions and their learned basic knowledge. Second, each students can fully
express their own views and understanding the problems under the condition of
discussion and argumentation, students often can appear to conflict with some
points, they can set up their own opinions for reflection and judgment (Guo
et al., 2010). Finally, the discussion and argumentation can give students
to create a positive exploration and independent innovation environment. In
this case, all students have the opportunity to participate in exploring, as
long as the team identified a subject with some aspect of scientific values,
or the subjects closely related with training practice. In this process, there
will be different answers with different understanding of these questions, the
research group may collect and summarizes all these answers and analysis the
deviation which was caused in different members of the group. In this stage,
the roles of teachers are to teach their correct thinking method, so as to make
students know how to study and how to think.
Focusing on the process of thinking problems of the research-orient teaching
pattern: The implementation of research-oriented teaching pattern should
attach great importance to the thinking process of problem solving and teachers
should not too much emphasize the correctness of the result. Mr. Hainer, a German
educator had said that it would hinder the students study hard if teachers predict
results or hint the solution to students. Teachers should not to much go after
the correct conclusions in the process of inquiry learning and should attach
importance to students' thinking process of problem solving. For example, the
approaches of excitability on neuromuscular can be divided into electric transmission
and chemical transmission, what kind of approach is more accurate? What is the
distinguishing feature of the energy metabolism in the exercise of weightlifting,
100, 800 m and marathon? Why the aerobic exercise is one of the best ways to
improve cardiovascular function, etc. To answer these questions, students must
have comprehensive exercise physiology knowledge and fully understand the relationship
of exercise with aerobic metabolism. In the process of solving these problems,
teachers should not give any hint in order to show the student’s
thinking process.
Evaluation systems focusing on the research process of the research-orient
teaching pattern: Openness is the important characteristics of research-orient
teaching pattern, it is focused on the cultivation of innovation spirit and
practice ability (Sun et al., 2011). In this
process, teachers should pay attention to provide students more opportunities
for participation and practice, make students improve the innovation ability.
Because different learning materials may hold their own opinions, students’
learning materials are not confined to teaching materials which are provided
by teachers. At the same time, openness is the essential property of the research-orient
teaching pattern which requires teachers will not be used the global summative
evaluation model for students' academic but the whole process of evaluation,
that is a combination of formative assessment with summative assessment or a
combination of classroom teaching with extracurricular autonomous learning,
utilization of diversified styles of examination or appraisal, so as to promote
the reform of examination system. The composition of a student's academic performance
also should be diversified which should involve in various inquiry learning
activities, research achievements and their final academic examination. Also,
in order to encourage students' inquiry learning activities, students also should
be concerned who are achieved good performance in research learning, though
the final examination is not so good.
CONCLUSION
It was important to increase the teaching time of practical course for exercise
physiology: Exercise physiology was an experimental science and the object
of study is human being. Its knowledge hierarchy was mainly obtained from the
experiments or measurement from human body, so it wass important to carry out
the practical course for exercise physiology combined with sports. As the beginner
of the college or university students, it was appropriate to select some practical
and common experimental methods and measurement index (e.g., heart rate, blood
lactic acid and hemoglobin) and design some practical activities according to
current conditions and then they took themselves part in this practical activities
to measure and collect data. The teachers would solve some problems which students
might occur on the spot, so as to cultivate the students' ability to apply their
knowledge.
It was prerequisite to construct a convenient platform for research-orient
teaching pattern: In the process of the research-oriented teaching, it involved
in the teachers how to teach and students how to study, this interactive process
was fused each other during the research-oriented teaching. The platform based
on the network provided a variety of convenient conditions and teaching or studying
resources. First, the network environment should be built to met the research-oriented
teaching demand, exercise physiology knowledge or related learning materials
can be retrieved or searched by students on this platform. Secondly, the BBS
should be run to carry out online discussion and sharing. Lastly, some communication
software (MSN, QQ, skype and other instant messaging software) should become
an essential tools for students to link up online or offline with teachers or
experts.
It is necessary to reform the evaluation system for students’ academic
achievement: The research-oriented teaching pattern focused on training
practical ability and innovation spirits, emphasis on process rather than the
results. So, the academic achievement evaluation system of research-oriented
teaching should also reflect on the process of the students' inquiry learning.
On the evaluation purpose, it should adhere to cultivate students' innovation
spirits and improve the students' practical ability, rather than the examination
results. In the evaluation principle, it should insist on the principle of guidance
and incentive, teachers should give students enough encouragement even a tiny
of progress or achievement in the inquiry activity (Xu,
2010). Teachers should pay more attention to student's individual difference,
so as to construct the personalized target and principle of evaluation in the
process of research-oriented teaching activity. On the evaluation standard,
teachers should not regard the examination scores as a single evaluation standard,
pay more attention to evaluate the learning process and learning attitude, attach
importance to students’ learning attitude and learning methods and learning
ability and the ability to find problems and solve problems in the process of
intelligent comprehensive thinking or innovating. The evaluation of research-oriented
teaching should be done around the inquiry learning activities, so the formative
assessment was usually used. Accordingly, the evaluation content should include
whether to have the courage to bear the liability for inquiry learning; whether
you can actively solve the problems utilizing various strategies and pathways;
whether you can communicate with teachers and classmates to exchange your opinions,
share your ideas and information; whether you can overcome the difficulties
to obtain the scientific conclusions or results.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This study was supported by Educational Rreform Project of Hunan University
of Science and Technology (G31057).
