• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.567-578
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• 2022

In this study, we examine whether the description of the elementary science curriculum guide, the concept of evolution, and the beliefs of teachers affect the teaching practice in classes related to adaptation of elementary school teachers. First, we examined the alternative concept among the sentences described in the bio-adaptation-related unit of the 2009 Elementary Science Curriculum Teacher's Guide and identified the effects of this description on the teaching practice of elementary school teachers. Next, six elementary school teachers were classified according to the results of the evolutionary concept test paper and the evolutionary belief test paper, and based on the class recording data and interview data, whether there is a difference in teaching execution. As a result, it was confirmed that there were a total of 18 descriptions corresponding to the concept of evolutionary alternatives in the analysis of instruction descriptions, and that these descriptions influenced elementary school teachers' adaptation concepts and teaching practice. Next, the group with high and low levels of evolution differ in the areas of "recognition of importance in the unit, distinction between adaptation concepts in the general sense and adaptation concepts in the biological sense, errors in the class," and "recognition of evolutionary education needs in the elementary curriculum." This study is meaningful in that it qualitatively confirms the research on the evolution concept of elementary school teachers, which has been approached quantitatively, and in-depth, confirms how the description, evolution concepts, and evolutionary beliefs affect elementary school teachers' biological adaptation concepts.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.1537-1550
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• 2012

This study aims to explore the differences between Korean and United States college students regarding their degree of religiosity, interest in, understanding and acceptance of evolution, and the effects of their interaction on these variables. A total of one thousand and fifteen Korean and US biology majors and non-majors college students participated in this study and a sub sample of 516 students were randomly selected for statistical tests. The results illustrated that Korean college students harbored significantly lower degrees of religiosity and interest in evolution but significantly higher degrees of knowledge and acceptance of evolution than US college students. The path analysis uncovered that the knowledge of and interest in evolution played a mediating role between religiosity and acceptance of evolution. Korean college students' interest in evolution was less correlated to other variables than US college students' interest. The acceptance of evolution was less predicted by knowledge of evolution in the Korean biology major sample than in the US biology major sample. The acceptance of evolution was predicted more by religiosity in the Korean non-major sample than in US non-major sample. This study suggests that future Korean science curriculum for evolution needs to enhance the degree of students' interest in evolution. In addition, future Korean science curriculum needs an instructional strategy in developing students' ability to make scientific decisions, such as the acceptance of evolution, without interference from their personal religious belief.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.659-668
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• 2017

This study was conducted to identify whether there is a significant difference in the developmental stages of the evolution concept depending on the major and the country. For this study, college students (both biology major and non-biology major) in Korea and the United States answered evolution concept assessment developed by Ha (2007). The data were analyzed based on the method of developed by Ha (2016). As a result of this study, Cronbach alpha for internal consistency reliability and MNSQ indices for item response fitness of the ordered multiple choice method providing 0 to 4 point scores to creationism, teleology, intentionality, use/disuse, and natural selection respectively, satisfied the benchmark. The level of Korean college students' evolution concepts was located in use/disuse and the level of USA college students' evolution concepts was located in teleology. No interaction effect was found between the difference of conceptual progressions of evolution concept by major and country and evolution contexts (human, animal, and plant). There was a significant relationship between developmental stages of evolution concept and their religiosity. Based on the results of this study, we discuss developmental characteristics of evolutionary concepts.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.801-814
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to find out whether pre-service biology teachers' biological meanings of competition and adaptation is the same as everyday meanings to understand natural selection and evolution. Fifty three pre-service biology teachers answered written tests and thirteen of them were interviewed. The tests on general meanings on competition and adaptation, tests on biological meanings on competition and adaptation and tests on natural selection were administered. Questions on semi-structured interviews were composed of only biological meanings about competition and adaptation. Analyzing data through four steps, pre-service biological teachers' general meanings on competition and adaptation were compared with the definitions of Korean dictionary and compared with biological definitions. Pre-service teachers' alternative conceptions about biological competition and adaptation were classified and the alternative conceptual types were checked when explaining natural selection and evolution. They realized competition is battle for intention or purpose like everyday meaning of competition. However, they didn't realize adaptation happen in the population level. They thought that adaptation, like in everyday life meaning, is getting suitable to environment for survival on an individual level. By relating adaptation to evolution, they thought that long-lasting adaptation become evolution. This study has significance with respect to suggesting the alternative concepts of competition and adaptation based on effective evolution teaching from constructivism viewpoint and highlighting the importance of the concepts of biological competition and adaptation, which have been concerned rarely for a long time.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.693-711
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• 2009

One of the most important objectives in science education is to develop students' science literacy. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relevance between biology instructional objectives in the 7th curriculum taught in elementary and secondary schools. For this study, 7 major parts in each grade were analyzed including cell, the form and function of plants, the form and function of animals, genetics, diversity, evolution, ecology, and environment. The strand map of instructional objectives is completed that represents the relation between the objectives. The summary of the results from this study is as follows. First, the concept about cells is not fully covered in lower grades including elementary schools. While the concept of energy metabolism is repeatedly covered, there is no concept of energy covered in learning the concept of energy metabolism in elementary schools. Second, the textbooks in elementary and middle schools have main concepts about the form and function of plants while those in high schools don't. The concept related to the part of the form and function of animals is repeatedly involved in the curriculum throughout the elementary, middle, and high schools. Third, the concepts such as genetics and evolution are involved in higher grades since these concepts are abstract ones. The part of genetics and evolution as well as diversity has no connection between grades in schools, so the development of "notion between" is necessary to relate these concepts with each other. Fourth, the 4 parts of diversity, ecology and environment, evolution, and the form and function of plants are covered in limited grade levels. The results of the relevance of gene in lesson goals will play an important rein as the primary material in developing the connection between textbooks in which lesson goals are closely related to each other throughout all grade levels in elementary, middle and high schools.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.887-900
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• 2011

Teachers use explanations to communicate important scientific ideas to students. Consequently, all biology teachers should be evaluated to determine how effective they are at constructing and communicating biological explanations. Open response questions are required to detect pre-service biology teachers' abilities to communicate robust and accurate scientific explanations. Nevertheless, multiple-choice questions are typically preferred by educators because of the common drawbacks of using open-response instruments, such as scoring time, inter-rater scoring disagreements, and delayed feedback to test takers. This study aims to measure pre-service biology teachers' competence in building scientific explanations and to investigate how accurately multiple-choice questions predict the results of open-response questions. One hundred twenty four pre-service biology teachers participated in the study and were administered 20 multiple-choice items and three open-response items designed to measure the accuracy and quality of their explanations of evolutionary change. The results demonstrated that pre-service teachers displayed higher competence when tested with multiple choice items than when tested with open response items. Moreover, scores derived from multiple-choice items poorly predicted the scores derived from open-response items. Multiple-choice items were also found to be poor measures of the consistency, purity and abundance of conceptual elements in teachers' evolutionary explanations. Additionally, many teachers held mixed-models composed of both scientific and naive ideas, which were difficult to detect using multiple-choice formats. Overall, the study indicates that multiple-choice formats are poorly suited to measuring several aspects of biology teachers' knowledge of evolution, including their ability to generate scientific explanations. This study suggests that open-response items should be used in teacher education programs to assess pre-service teachers' explanatory competency prior to being permitted to teach science to children.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.89-99
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of students' formation of evolutionary concept and learning on the development of digital teaching materials. The explanation of biological evolution, which explains the changes that living organisms undergo over a long period of time, can provide various contents for use in a book. The production and editing of images in digital textbooks would provide explanation of difficult concepts in a fun way. For this study, we designed instructional materials consisting of four class hours using iBooks Author, an electronic book authoring tool based on the 5E learning cycle model. In order to verify the effectiveness of the developed digital textbooks, we compared instructions by the general textbooks to those using digital textbooks. Both teaching through general textbook form and teaching using digital textbook materials had a significant effect on the formation of the concept of evolution, but interest in biological science and evolution increased significantly only in the group taught using digital textbooks. As a result of testing the instruction effect by the digital textbooks by classifying the students by type, the group that is familiar with smart devices was more active and interesting in class depending on digital literacy. The satisfaction of the developed digital textbooks also showed a positive score in the group with high digital literacy. The results of this study suggest that the development of digital textbooks in the unit of evolution can be an instructional material for easy and interesting approach to difficult concepts in the teaching of evolution.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.246-259
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to investigate pre-service biology teachers' perception of the evolution. This study was to compare the views of pre-service biology teachers with no religion with those of christian preservice teachers. Subjects were 77 pre-service biology teachers who enrolled in an university and graduate school of education located in Seoul. The instrument of this study was a questionnaire which consisted of 14 items on 2 domains: the nature of science, the origins of human beings. The key results are as follows. Most pre-service teachers showed highly understanding of the characteristics of science. However pre-service biology teachers still possessed naive views on the distinction of law and theory. In terms of the methods of science, many of the pre-service biology teachers considered scientific theories to progress through the accumulation of observation and experiments or through changes and modifications in existing theories. Compared with the pre-service teachers with no religion, christian pre-service teachers had conflicting views and misconceptions about the origins of human beings. The factors of religion were found to be one of the important barriers which prevent them from understanding the origins of human beings. The results suggested that the education program for pre-service biology teachers integrating the concepts and development process of the scientific knowledges should be effective for understanding the nature of science. For pre-service biology teachers, It is important to understand conflicting views of the christian pre-service teachers who understand creationism as a science.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.21-31
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• 2009

This research is to classify game rules which are important factors for the game, and to define the basis of the each level of rules and concepts. In terms of these definitions, the process of transformation in the game rule is analyzed, and examined the development related to evolution. The rule of digital game is analogous to the biological evolution. From this point of view, This research presents the structural similarities between the game rules and biological evolution. It is for the investigation of the development using new perspective and for the conceptualization of the process. Moreover it makes us rediscover the game as a scholastic research subject.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.691-707
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• 2015

This study aims to develop biology teachers' education program based on argumentation activity about core concepts of evolution and to analyze the characteristics of core concepts of evolution learned during the program. The eight core concepts of evolution in this study were variation, heritability of variation, competition, natural selection, adaptation, differential reproductive rate of individuals, changes in genetic pool within a population, and macroevolution. The performances of teachers participating in the program were compared before and after argumentation activities; consisting of seven sessions on the eight core concepts of evolution. The process of the program was specially designed by learning cycle model for teacher education, consisting of seven phases: identification of the task, production of a tentative argument, small group's written argument, share arguments with the other groups, reflective discussion, final written argument, and organization by an instructor. Participants in the study were two pre-service biology teachers and four in-service biology teachers. The results suggest that biology teachers reduced the teleological explanation for biological evolution and improve its adequacy after the intervention. Teachers lacked the opportunity to discuss variation, heritability of variation, competition, and macroevolution because science textbooks lack information on the concepts of biological evolution. The results of this study suggest that because the argumentation program developed for teachers helps to improve understanding the concepts of evolution and to reduce inadequate conceptions in biology, teacher education programs using argumentation activity and eight core concepts of evolution will play a role for efficient evolution education for biology teachers.