• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.221-233
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• 2002

This study investigated preservice science teachers' understandings of philosophical foundations(i.e., ontological and epistemological beliefs) underlying constructivist notions of learning. The teacher education program these subjects participated in explicitly addressed philosophical notions consistent with different views of constructivism. For these preservice science teachers, the program provided them with the opportunity to reflect upon the implications that their ontological and epistemological commitments had for their role as a science teacher. Data from four in-depth interviews were used to explore changes in each preservice science teacher's ontological beliefs, epistemological commitments, and pedagogical preferences. Results indicated that ontological beliefs and epistemological commitments were not necessarily consistent with conceptions of science teaching and learning for these preservice teachers. While some students internalized idealist and relativist perspectives, they did not integrate these relativist epistemological views into their preferred instructional practices. Also, regarding the fallible and tentative nature of knowledge, data in this study indicated that participants' epistemological beliefs about scientific Knowledge did influence how they were thinking about their roles as science teachers. Implications for teacher education programs and research on preservice science teacher's philosophical beliefs are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.242-258
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• 2002

This study investigated preservice teachers' understandings of the ontology and epistemology underlying constructivist notions of teaming. Throughout this study, the epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical characteristics for each teacher's developing views of learning were identified through four in-depth interviews. Data from interviews were used to create three profiles containing ontological beliefs, epistemological commitments and pedagogical beliefs. This study has demonstrated that the notion of a constructivist profile change has significant potential for informing the analysis and description of preservice teachers' beliefs changes. Major findings include: constructivist profile changes overtime, diversification of profile components over time, features of the teachers' pedagogical belief profile changes, and teachers' unawareness of their profiles. However, changes in ontological beliefs and epistemological commitments were not easy, nor were they easily internalized for these teachers. The implications of this research are that preservice teachers should be aware of coexisting different categories of their learning-to-teach profiles, and that teacher educators should provide these preservice teachers with instruction designed to change preservice teachers' profiles towards increasing constructivist views of teaching and learning and restricting other undesirable categories.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.309-323
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• 2002

This qualitative study investigated preservice teachers' understandings of the ontology and epistemology underlying constructivist notions of learning through four in-depth interviews. Of the sixteen participants in a larger study, five significantly changed ontological and epistemological beliefs and eleven did not. This study focused on these eleven teachers who have hardly changed their philosophical beliefs throughout the teacher education program. Ten teachers who consistently maintained the scientific realist beliefs were presented as a composite case (Young's case). Among the eleven teachers, there was one outlier who had consistently maintained an idealist and relativist epistemological position from the beginning of the study and was subjected to another case analysis (Ben's case). These cases corroborated the assertion that each individual's deeply entrenched ontological and epistemological beliefs are very hard to change. For researchers, this study offers insights into the reasons that preservice teachers give for non-changes in their thinking about learning to teach. The study also examines preservice teachers' perceived constraints in implementing their ideal pedagogies and the influence of the teacher education program on their pedagogical beliefs changes. The benefits and influences of the M.Ed. program's theoretical coursework and the field experiences on these teachers' learning-to-teach experiences are addressed with rich data. The implications for teacher educators as well as for the instructional practices of preservice teacher education programs are discussed. This research emphasize necessity of the field-based teacher education program and the need of empowering experienced school teachers as teacher educators in teacher preparation and professional development.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.261-275
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• 2016

Many students have dualistic beliefs about mathematics and its learning- for example, there is always just one right answer in mathematics and their role in the classroom is receiving and absorbing knowledge from teacher and textbook. This article investigated some epistemic implications and limitations of common mathematics teaching practices, which often present mathematical facts(or procedures) and treat students' errors in a certain and absolute way. Langer and Piper's (1987) experiment and Oliveira et al.'s (2012) study suggested that presenting knowledge in conditional language which allows uncertainty can foster students' productive epistemological beliefs. Changing the focus and patterns of classroom communication about students' errors could help students to overcome their dualistic beliefs. This discussion will contribute to analyze the implicit epistemic messages conveyed by mathematics instructions and to investigate teaching strategies for stimulating students' epistemic development in mathematics.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.427-447
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• 2001

Science teachers need to understand what science is, how students learn, how to teach science effectively, and the rationale for their teaching methods. Along this line, this article discusses constructivist learning theory as an alternative to the traditional pedagogy and the origin of various versions of constructivism. Constructivism is defined and used in a variety of contexts including philosophical constructivism, constructivist research paradigm, sociological constructivism, and educational constructivism. Educational constructivism (or psychological constructivism) can be divided into three distinct versions (i.e., individual, radical, and social constructivism) depending on unique ontological and epistemological beliefs that underlie each version. Each version of educational constructivism supports different conceptions of science teaching and learning that are consistent with its specific ontological and epistemological beliefs. In this article, the main tenets of each version of educational constructivism are examined with regard to ontological beliefs, epistemological commitments, and pedagogical beliefs. In addition, two major criticisms on constructivist pedagogy as well as implications for research methods for each version are also discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.475-491
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• 2006

In physics education, the research on students' conceptions has developed in the discussion on the nature and the difficulty of conceptual change. Recently, mental models have been a theoretical background in concrete arguments on "how students' conceptions are constructed or created." Mental models that integrate information in the presented problem and individual knowledge in their long-term memory have important information about not only expressed ideas but also in the thinking process behind the expressed ideas. The purpose of this study is to investigate the forming process and the characteristics of high school student's mental models about circular motion, and how they were changed by instruction. We used the think-aloud method based on the instrument for identifying student's mental models about circular motion, pretest of physics concept, mind map and interview for investigating student's characteristics. The results of the study showed that instructions based on the mental model theory facilitated scientific expressed model, but several factors that affected forming mental models like epistemological belief didn't change scientifically after 3 lessons.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.56-68
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to investigate students' ontological categories about rocks and the earth's crust and plate tectonics. A total of 169 high school students in the first grade were involved in the study, and in order to extend the boundary and tendency of the research, structuralized questions and coding frame were generated. Additionally, the results from all students were codified in four levels according to coding frame (matter, transformation, proto-process, and process). Followings are the results. First, the ontological categories of students about the concepts of this research were classified dominantly into a matter and transformation within the boundary of 67% of rocks, and 75% of the crust. The propensity of plate tectonics in terms of ontological category were analyzed by being codified into 68% of process category which proved to have relatively process-oriented perspective. Secondly, the inclination to allocate ontological categories of each students in terms of field concepts were confirmed in 16% and 31% per each student that were codified into process categories and matter categories. Most students that were codified into matter category responded to high tendency to view the world as a combination of simple substances. Moreover, the students had ontological faith that speculates only through a state or an incident in terms of concepts that form a structure of knowledge.

• Journal of Korean Classical Literature and Education
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• no.37
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• pp.185-215
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• 2018

This paper tried to interpret new phenomenon in the narrative focusing on the tale. People telling about this story understood it in the way of recognizing and resigning the power of powerful destiny. This article poses a problem to that point. The male character begins the question "why?" And experiences a process of thoughtful thought. And he finds out his past life and pioneers his destiny. The find past life in this tale, it means 'an opportunity to choose oneself and life for themselves'. This can be interpreted as Samsara of Buddhism that does not insist on a fixed self. Experience of this process of reasoning according to narrative context of folktale will become literary therapy activity confirming the effectiveness of marital conflict narrative including the former motifs.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.43-58
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• 2006

An objective of this paper is to discuss the didactical contracts which have been conceptualized by Brousseau. He modelled mathematics instruction as a game. In such game, didactical contracts existed as its own hidden rules which teacher and student should obey Brousseau introduced it to reveal certain hidden rules which regulates mathematics instruction. Those rules are implicit and reciprocal. In particular, it is not revealed until students break. He defined didactical contracts as teacher's behaviour and corresponding students 'behaviour in order to define it operationally. He he did not define it in psychological and epistemological dimension. But it is necessary to discuss teacher's belief system and epistemology, since teacher's behaviour in instruction is affected by them. He also did not discuss fully teacher's breaking of didactical contracts.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.592-608
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• 2007

This study explored the types of conceptual change of 'force' within middle school students' conceptual ecologies. This qualitative study was implemented with the use of classroom observations and two interviews with the participants. 11 middle school students (7 females and 4 males) joined in this study. The interviews with the participants were conducted individually before and after the 'force' unit. The collected data were all transcribed and analyzed interpretively. The results of this study consisted of two parts. First, the participants' conceptual ecologies of 'force' were categorized into 4: epistemological commitments (fixed or interactional explanatory consistency), analogy (attribute, working), metaphysical beliefs (people-oriented ontology, animism, causationism, mixed), and past experiences. Second, two representative cases including 'stable' and 'transitional' states were explained based on the interactions within their own conceptual ecologies. We can see students' conceptions with the integrated perspective in the sense that this results tried to get contextual and interactional understandings of the status of the conception and the possibilities of conceptual change. In addition, it implied that conceptual change research should have the perspective of conceptual ecology evolution in the future.