• Korean Journal of Comparative Education
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.53-75
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• 2013

This article explores the impact of mergers on the experiences of students. A case design is used to gain an in-depth understanding of the students in a Korean university that was combined with a two-year college in 2007. Semi-structured interviews of 11 direct entrants, 5 transfer students, and 7 professors were conducted in 2010 for the data collection. The results suggest that mergers do not necessarily ensure the integration of the students involved. Since mergers pose enormous challenges to both transfer students and direct entrants, university leaders need to give careful attention to students' persistence and integration as the campus changes. The results also reveal that students' experience of mergers may be affected by cultural backgrounds as well as the hierarchical structure of higher education. In Korean society, where credentialism prevails, mergers can have different impacts on students who come from initial institutions of differing perceived quality, and thus mergers may incite tension among the students. In light of these concerns, this study's findings highlight the importance of student integration as a key element in mergers.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.121-134
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• 2011

Stevin is known as the inventor of decimal fractions, even though many mathematicians had the concept of decimal fractions and used it before Stevin. Why? To respond to such a question, we studied about its significance which 'La Disme' had in the history of mathematics. These can be summarized as its notational aspect, the manner of developing the book, the conceptual revolution and the practical purpose. And the chapter and verse of are little known when compared to its reputation. So in this paper we considered its contents in detail and discussed some didactical implications in relation to teaching and learning of decimal fractions in elementary school : importance of place values, similarity of calculation to natural numbers, using common fractions to justify, emphasis on the applications of decimal fractions, relation to measuring units, necessity of teaching number sense, using notational aspects.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.172-180
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• 2014

The first purpose of this study is to distinguish difficult chapters in 'Speed of objects' chapter and find the factors which give difficulty to the teachers and students. Also, it attempts to compare the students' assessment scores with the degree of difficulty in teaching and also with the degree of difficulty in learning. This report is expected to help science teachers develop their PCK(Pedagogical Content Knowledge) for teaching the chapter professionally. 15 teachers who had taught the 'Speed of Objects' chapter and their 386 students took part in the survey to acquire information about the difficulties in teaching and learning. 386 students also received a test to examine their understandings of the chapter. The results of this study are as follow; First, the degree of teachers' and students' difficulty is only affected by the contents, and the degree of onerousness felt by teachers is higher than that of students. Second, The topics caused higher difficulty to teachers were 'Understanding the meaning of motion(2nd lesson)', 'Understanding the meaning and unit of speed(5th lesson)', 'Changing unit of speed(6th lesson)', 'Drawing a distance-time graph(7th lesson)', and 'Understanding the relative motion(10th). The topics that led higher difficulty to students were the contents of 5th, 6th, and 7th lessons. Third, the 'Speed of Objects' chapter can be divided into 4 types of difficulty according to the degree of teaching and learning; 'Strong difficulty', 'Learning difficulty', 'Weak difficulty', and 'Teaching difficulty'. Last, students showed low achievement to the tasks that were related with 'Strong difficulty' and 'Teaching difficulty'.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.348-358
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• 2013

The purpose of this study is to develop the science item on computer-based performance assessment which is able to replace the assessment with actual experimental apparatus. The survey on the necessities and the difficulties of the assessment with actual experimental apparatus was conducted with 57 physics teachers. By reflecting the results of the survey, the computer-based assessment items which are related with constructing circuits with an ammeter and a voltmeter were developed. The developed computer-based assessment items were organized in similarity to assessment conducted with actual experimental apparatus, proper feedback was provided by students' performance in the process of assessment so as to grading performance results automatically. To achieve them, the algorithm was developed so that computer can judge the accuracy of students' performance results.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.30-35
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• 1961

Inasmuch as a great variety of methods for the leukocyte differential counting have been described, it may be expected that actual counts obtained considerably vary according with the particular methods applied to the enumeration of differentiated leukocyes. An attempt, therefore, was undertaken to compare the values measured by five authentic methods commonly in use with those obtained by thirteen methods devised by the author. The results seemed to indicate that relatively reliable method is to count, end to end, all leucocytes on fields looted on the central horizontal axis of the film and two adjacent lines parallel to the central line and quartering the film.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.531-538
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• 2005

The primary purpose of the study was to investigate the degree of difficulty and the causes of the difficulties in science instruction reported by elementary teachers and students. The secondary purpose was to suggest the effective methods to both of them to improve the efficiency of science instruction. For this study, the survey was carried out on 322 students and 156 teachers in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades. The questionnaires consisted of interest, difficulty and its factors. The results of this investigation are summarized as follows; 1. Teachers had relatively higher interest than students in science instruction content(textbook). Furthermore, the units that teachers showed interest differed from those that students had. This means that there is a significant difference of interest in instruction process between teachers and students. 2. Teachers felt much higher difficulty than students in the content of science instruction. This shows that the degree of interest might have little relation with that of difficulty, and that teaching of science seemed more difficult than teaming. Moreover, there was a difference of difficulty in the units between the teachers and students. The result shows a distinctive difference of difficulty in 8 units of the 3rd grade, 9 units n the 4th grade, and 12 units in the 5th grade (p<.05, p<.001, p<.005, respectively). It means that the difficulty depended on the units. 3. Students responded that they are responsible for difficulty factors of teaming, otherwise teachers thought that students are responsible for it, when the factors were divided into student factor, teacher factor, and curriculum factor. 4. Students demanded many experiments in the lab as well as easy and interesting instructions in order to reduce the degree of difficulty and to improve the condition of science instructions. However, teachers demanded the expansion of experimental equipments and materials as well as the improvement of the lab condition.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.37-52
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• 2015

In this study, assessment items to examine geocognition on plate tectonics were developed and applied to middle and high school students and college students. Conceptual constructs on plate tectonics are Earth interior structure, specific geomorphology, and geologic phenomena at each plate boundary. Construct for geocognition included temporal reasoning, spatial reasoning, retrospective reasoning, and system thinking. Pictorial data in each item were all obtained from GeoMapApp. Students' responses to the items were analyzed and measured cross-sectionally by Rasch model, which distinguishes persons' ability levels based on their scores for all items and compared them with item difficulty. By Rasch model analysis, Wright maps for middle and high school students and college students were obtained and compared with each other. Differential Item Functioning analysis was also implemented to compare students' item responses across school grades. The results showed: 1) Geocognition on plate tectonics was an assessable construct for middle and high school students in current science curriculum, 2) The most distinguished geocognition factor was spatial reasoning based on cross sectional analysis across school grades, 3) Geocognition on plate tectonics could be developed towards more sophisticated level through scaffolding of relevant instruction and earth science content knowledge, and 4) Geocognition was not a general reasoning separated from a task content but a content-specific reasoning related to the content of an assessment item. We proposed several suggestions for learning progressions for plate tectonics and national curriculum development based on the results of the study.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.60 no.1
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• pp.48-58
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• 2016

This study was to investigate the types of middle school students’ conceptual change on electrolyte and ion. Data were collected by pre- and post- exams of 9th grade students’ conceptions of electrolyte and ion, and by semi-structured interviews with nine students served as case representatives who participated in the study. All interviews were transcribed, analyzed and classified by conceptual change according to the responses of the students. The results are as follows: First, students’ ion conceptual change was classified into four types; simple conception to sophisticated conception, incomplete conception to scientific conception, misconception to confused conception, and misconception to misconception. Most students had difficulty in understanding of the concepts of ion in pre- and post-class, and they failed to distinguish between atom and subatomic particles precisely. Second, students’ conceptual change of electrolyte was also classified into the following four types; partially scientific conception to sophisticated conception, misconception to partial misconception, incomplete conception to incomplete conception and misconception to misconception. The study found that students had difficulty distinguishing the difference between electrolytes and nonelectrolytes. Third, students also had difficulty understanding the concepts on particles because they learned the ‘electrolyte and ion’ unit so quickly in the second semester of 9th grade in order to fill in the academic reports for applying high schools. Furthermore, some suggestions were made based on the results for understanding scientific concepts on particles.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.658-672
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• 2022

The unique teaching and learning difficulties of speed-related units in elementary school science are mainly due to the student's lack of mathematical thinking ability and procedural knowledge on speed measurement, and curriculums and textbooks must be constructed with these in mind. To identify the implications of composing a new science curriculum and relevant textbooks, this study reviewed the structure and contents of the speed-related units of three curriculums from the 2007 revised curriculum to the 2015 revised curriculum and the resulting textbooks and examined their relevance in light of the literature. Results showed that the current content carries the risk of making students calculate only the speed of an object through a mechanical algorithm by memorization rather than grasp the multifaceted relation between traveled distance, duration time, and speed. Findings also highlighted the need to reorganize the curriculum and textbooks to offer students the opportunity to learn the meaning of speed step-by-step by visualizing materials such as double number lines and dealing with simple numbers that are easy to calculate and understand intuitively. In addition, this paper discussed the urgency of improving inquiry performance such as process skills by observing and measuring an actual object's movement, displaying it as a graph, and interpreting it rather than conducting data interpretation through investigation. Lastly, although the current curriculum and textbooks emphasize the connection with daily life in their application aspects, they also deal with dynamics-related content somewhat differently from kinematics, which is the main learning content of the unit. Hence, it is necessary to reorganize the contents focusing on cases related to speed so that students can grasp the concept of speed and use it in their everyday lives. With regard to the new curriculum and textbooks, this study proposes that students be provided the opportunity to systematically and deeply study core topics rather than exclude content that is difficult to learn and challenging to teach so that students realize the value of science and enjoy learning it.