• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.789-802
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• 2007

This study investigated pre-service elementary teachers' understanding of the basic concepts of and their attitudes toward astronomy in Korea and Japan. The survey instrument called the Astronomy Diagnostic lest (ADT) that was developed by the Collaboration for Astronomy Education Research (CAER) in 1998 was used and modified to tailor to the two countries' contexts, including 12 items written in the two languages, Korean and Japanese. The attitudes toward astronomy were examined by the Survey of Attitudes toward Astronomy (SATA), which was developed by Zeilik et al. in 1999. Cronbach's alpha of this sample of the study was 0.69, while the reliability of SATA was 0.87. All the pre-service elementary teachers in both Korea and Japan showed a low-level understanding of the basic concepts of astronomy. 38% of Korean pre-service elementary teachers had correct answers to the questions regarding the basic conceptions of astronomy, while 37% of Japanese participants had correct answers to them. Although there was no statistically significant difference between Korean and Japanese pre-service elementary teachers, Korean teachers scored higher than Japanese participants in SATA. A significant difference, however, was revealed in the categories of cognitive competence and value of the attitudes toward astronomy (p <.05). In addition, it was found that both Korean and Japanese pre-service elementary teachers scored less than 40% about the basic concepts of astronomy and that they obtained lower scores than the US college students with regard to the attitudes toward astronomy.