The enhancement of the quality of the teaching practice is a major factor in securing better schooling opportunities for students. In this article, initial teacher preparation of secondary school Earth science teachers, in-service science teacher education, and improving teacher policy are discussed. Data from in-depth interviews with exemplary science teachers were used to explore how to improve the quality of science teacher education in Korea. In terms of preservice teacher education, most exemplary teachers contended that teacher education programs should provide preservice teachers with practical knowledge by translating theory into practice. Their suggestions for how to improve in-service education are also discussed. Regarding directions of improving teacher policy in Korea, the teachers proposed an alternative teacher-promotion structure that incorporates the master-teacher position. Implications for introducing action research courses into teacher (re)education programs are also discussed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between cognitive conflict and students' causal attributions and to find out what kinds of attributions affect successful resolution of cognitive conflict in learning physics. Twenty-nine college students who attended a base general physics course took an attribution test and a conceptual pretest related to action and reaction concept. Of these, twenty students who revealed alternative conceptions were selected. They were confronted with a discrepant demonstration and took part in the cognitive conflict level test, a posttest, and delayed posttest. Those students who experienced high levels of cognitive conflict were selected and interviewed to find out what kinds of attributions affect resolving the conflict. When confronted with the discrepant event, the students who attributed success outcomes to "effort" experienced higher levels of cognitive conflict than those to "task difficulty." However, those students who revealed high levels of cognitive conflict and attributed success outcomes to effort did not always produce conceptual change. They had different perspectives on effort and conducted different effort activities to resolve the cognitive conflict. In addition, these effort activities appeared to include their motivational beliefs, metacognitive and volitional strategies. The results of this study indicate that in order for the conflicts to lead to change, students need to have the perspective on effort implying the use of the self-regulated learning strategy and to conduct effort activities based on them. Beyond cold conceptual change, this article suggests that there is a management strategy of cognitive conflict in the classroom context.

This study explored the relationship between argumentation and the conceptual change model in a science teacher's explanations. Ten audiotape recordings (about 9 hours) collected in a high school physics classroom were all transcribed. The transcripts were analyzed using the components of Toulmin's argument framework and two constructs of the conceptual change model: the status of a conception, and the conceptual ecology. This analysis reveals that there are dynamic relationships among Toulmin's argument components, the status of a conception, and the conceptual ecology. The episode extracted from the transcripts shows the science teacher's explanations in the flow of classroom discourse, as directed and guided by her, presenting the intelligibility or plausibility of a conception by using warrants or backings such as examples or anomalies, two components of conceptual ecology.

The purpose of this study was to test the notion that the inter-individual difference in hypothesis-generating is presumably detected by differentiating subjects' EEG correlation patterns of the prefrontal lobes. To test the notion of the inter-individual difference by EEG analysis, eight healthy undergraduate volunteers' EEG signals on the prefrontal lobes were recorded during hypothesis-generating and resting with eyes-closed condition. Their EEG signals were analyzed by time durations and transformed into correlation patterns. The results showed that subjects' EEG correlation patterns during hypothesis-generating were significantly different among individuals. In addition, the EEG correlation patterns were decreased during hypothesis-generating thinking. Furthermore, subject's EEG correlation showed a fluctuationpattern through-out hypothesis-generating, which is presumably caused by the difference of subjects' thinking activities in hypothesis-generating. This study also suggests a possibility that student's scientific thinking ability and the difficulty of scientific knowledge generating may be measured by the analysis of subject's EEG correlation pattern of the prefrontal lobes.

The scientific inquiry enterprise consists of formulating hypotheses, testing hypotheses, evaluating evidence, and revising hypothesis. Scientific inquiry in the science classrooms requires students' background experience and knowledge with the phenomenon in order to ask appropriate questions, identify and define variables operationally, formulate hypotheses, and design clear and complete experiment. The ability to test hypotheses has been postulated to play a central role in cognitive processes. The purpose of this study was to analyze what the change of the quantity and quality of the hypothesis, the rejecting or accepting of the hypothesis, and the use results in the repetitional hypothesis activity experiments. To examine the problems, this study analyzed 5 classes which were designed and administered to 16 students of the 7th grade. The results of this study showed that students preferred the engineering method to scientific method and the quality of a second hypothesis got low. The quality of the hypothesis came to be higher through a repetitional hypothesis and the number of hypothesis was reduced. The results of the experiments did not play central roles in revising hypotheses and accepting or rejecting hypothesis.

When teachers for the gifted express metaphors about their teaching, they may develop better understanding and conceptualizing of teaching and enable to choose appropriate teaching strategies for optimizing individualized learning of the gifted. Therefore, the purpose of this study includes to explore metaphors about science teachers' teaching for the gifted in middle schools and classify into types of metaphors. The survey was administered and completed survey instruments by 66 science teachers for the gifted at gifted educational institutions affiliated with local offices of education and 18 science teachers at middle schools were analyzed. It was revealed that science teachers for the gifted described seven types of metaphors about their teaching with characteristics of student-centered (counsel, helper, etc.), teacher-centered (judge, captain, etc.), or student-teacher-interacted (painter, nurse, etc.) types. More than 60% of teachers described their teaching as either student-centered or student-teacher-interacted types. However, percentage of teachers for the teacher-centered and power-oriented type was higher for science teachers for the gifted (33%) than science teachers for regular students (22%). It was also found that female science teachers for the gifted showed higher percentage for teacher-centered and power-oriented (35%) than male teachers (28%) and teachers with BS degree showed higher percentage for student-centered and service-oriented type (33%) than teachers with MS degree (27%). In addition biology teachers for the gifted also were appeared to be more teacher-centered and power-oriented type (60%) than physics (21%), chemistry (6%), and earth science (33%).

This paper advances the thesis that the barrier separating curriculum theorists and practitioners is more than a difference in experiential and methodological orientation and is in part a product of a lack of appreciation of the complexities involved in curriculum development and dissemination. Discussed here is the possible use of engineering theory to facilitate meaningful communication and understanding about products and development. This work is an extension of the observation that curriculum development and dissemination can be characterized as an engineering process and shows how engineering theory provides connectivity between the multiple embedded domains of theory and of practice. To illustrate the thesis this paper offers an analysis of the Developmental Approaches in Science, Health, and Technology (DASH) program that has employed engineering theory in curriculum construction and dissemination. In this study, the role and place of engineering theory as applied to the DASH program is discussed to show how the components were designed and assembled into a fully functional curriculum and dissemination system. Engineering theory is presented as an interfacing organizer with the potential to facilitate meaningful communication between theorists and practitioners.

In the previous study, six factors which could disturb students' problem solving in an everyday context were identified and discussed. In this study, teaching materials to help students overcome those disturbing factors for successful problem solving in an everyday context were developed and applied to twenty-nine grade 10 students, and the effects of teaching materials were analyzed. According to the analysis of the correlation between the performance in everyday context problem solving and the benefit from the teaching materials, it was found that students who received the help from the teaching materials showed better performance with statistical significance. And students noted that teaching materials were helpful for them to solve the physics problems. Analyzing the overall performance of students in solving the everyday context problem, students in the experimental group showed better performance than the control group and this performance difference was larger among low-score students in school science testing. However, these differences were not statistically significant because the sample size was small. And, based on the analysis of interviews with students, it was also found that some students who showed low performance might not receive help from the teaching materials because the materials were too complex to be read easily, or because the basic concepts needed to solve the problem were not understood. Therefore, the results obtained from the interviews will be used to design more effective teaching for problem solving in an everyday context.

A Typically-Perceived-Situation(TPS) is a situation which might be useful for conceptual learning of science, rising spontaneously in an individual's mind when someone is thinking about, or in relation to, any object such as physical object, concept, situation, etc. But, for a discussion about the TPS' usefulness in depth, we need to analyze the specific features of the TPS in relation to conceptual learning of science. This study investigated four elementary school students' TPSs related to the topic of the action of force, especially (a) 'the situation where force is being acted on an object', and (b) 'the situation where force is not being acted on an object', with an interview as well as with a drawing-and-explanation type questionnaire. Their TPSs were then compared with their concepts, checked by a misconception questionnaire of choice-and-explanation type. The results showed that the students' TPSs illustrated not only their conceptions about the action of force, but also gave more fruitful details of their ideas, including (a) clues of their conceptions, (b) concrete situations, and (c) their past experiences with emotional components. On the whole, the TPS's appeared to be rather stable, affected by their past experiences, and needed to be analyzed into their sub-units for more subtle details. Finally, some practical ways of how to apply the ideas of the TPS to the conceptual learning of science are suggested.