Students' Perception of Continuous Change of the Nature

One of the prime objectives of school science is to help the children learn science concepts and conceptual schemes that will help them understand and interpret their environment. One of the basic scientific concepts is 'Change -everything existing in universe is changing always'. The purpose of this study was to investigate the characteristics of elementary and secondary students' conception of change. The subjects for this study were 489 students in Korea; 111 fourth graders, 95 sixth graders, 140 seventh graders and 143 ninth graders. Four items - mountain, river, ground, sea -were used for investigating students conception of change because representing the nature world in elementary and secondary level. The subjects were asked to check whether each item was changing and to explain each their check. Students' explanations were classified by whether they were sound understanding geologically, or not. The rate of responses that each item was changing was compared by grades and the rate of geological explanations was also compared by grades. Because students' conceptions of change might were effected by time scale, the additional questions that asked students whether the present status of four items were equivalent to the that of several points of time. As a result, the rate of scientific answers and patterns of explanations were similar by grade and the rate of geological understandings was relatively low. The frequencies of concept of change were more dropped as the point of time was closer to present.