The Analysis of Elementary School Students' Hypotheses in the Field Trip Contest of the Second Korean Youth Science Festival

자연보호답사대회 보고서에 진술된 국민학생의 가설능력의 분석

This study is to consider hypotheses with integral view on the respect of creative thinking. Subjects of this study are Korean students in the 5th grade who participated in the Field Trip Contest of the second Korean Youth Science Festival, an openended inquiry investigation. Objectives of this study are as follows: 1) to measure the inquiry level of the Field Trip Contest activity 2) to find how many hypotheses were made on different types in the inquiry investigation 3) to measure the quality level of hypotheses made in the scientific inquiry investigation 4) to find out the correlation between the 1st and 2nd hypotheses and the final activity score in the two staged scientific investigation In the consequence of it, inquiry level of the Field Trip Contest was very high with good activity topics and openended way of investigation. Hypotheses were made in the prediction, plan, and conclusion parts in the field trip activity report. They used hypothesis-as-prediction typed statements(3.41/team) more than hypothesis-as-explanation(1.28/team) and descriptive hypothesis(0.03/team) types. Content-related hypothesis(5.03/team) and process-related hypothesis(6.16/team) were usually coupled each other. Most of them had difficulties in hypothesis-from-evidence(0.31/team, 10/32 teams) in the comparison of hypothesis-from-simple conjecture(10.62/team). The quality level of content-related hypotheses(0.74point/statement) and process-related hypotheses(1.98point/statement) were very low by the hypothesis-quality scale(Quinn and George, 1975) for the content-related hypotheses and the process-related hypothesis quality scale developed in this study. There was considerable correlation between the activity score and the 1st and 2nd hypothesis in the 2 staged inquiry investigations with the 2nd and 3rd topics($0.41{\ast}$, $0.59{\ast}{\ast}$ repectively).