• Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.63-77
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• 2004

The purpose of this study was to construct an issue-centered discussion instructional model for Home Economics and to determine its effect on middle school students' critical thinking. The research questions were posed as below. 1) The object and content of home economics in the 7th national middle school curricula are analyzed to sort out possible issues. 2) An issue-centered discussion instructional model is constructed to be applicable to middle school home economics class. and a lesson plan is prepared. 3) The effect of the issue-centered discussion instructional model developed in this study on student critical thinking faculty is examined. The findings of this study were as follows : First. seven criteria were selected to determine what types of issues were applicable to home economics lesson. Based on the selected criteria. 41 themes of issues were extracted from the 7th middle school textbooks. and their content validity was verified. Second, an issue-centered discussion instructional model was designed to deal with four themes in eight sessions in the procedure of problem raising, confirming, term defining. tentative alternative selecting, data gathering. discussing/critical approaching. and selecting/concluding. Third, two different third-year classes of K middle school in the city of Busan that consisted of 75 students were respectively selected as an experimental group and a control group, and the experiment was conducted in eight sessions for five weeks to see whether the teaching plan brought any changes to the critical mind of the students. The experimental group exposed to the issue-centered discussion lesson made a significant progress in critical thinking faculty(P＜.05). In particular. that instruction gave a favorable impact on demonstration evaluating(P＜.05). one of the critical thinking subfactors. When the students were asked to assess the issue-centered discussion lesson. most of them viewed it favorably. In the future, more research efforts should be dedicated to enhancing the practical applicability of issue-centered discussion instruction in home economics education. developing good evaluation tools about critical thinking faculty and finding out how discussion instruction could be conducted more efficiently.