• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.43-56
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of small group inquiry skills on improving science process skills and attitudes toward science in elementary school science. The research questions of this study were as follows. First, effects of small group inquiry skills on improving science process skills in elementary school science. Second, effects of small group inquiry skills on improving attitudes toward science in elementary school science. The subjects of this study is two classes from 6th grade elementary classes in Busan. The experiment class practiced small group inquiry skills, while the control class practiced self inquiry. To verify the effect of the experiment, ANOVA was conducted. The main findings of this study are as follows. First, the small group inquiry skills gave a significant influence on increasing the science process skills, including the basic science process skills and the integrated science process skills, of students. Especially, among subordinate factors of science process skills between groups, it was effective to increase abilities of observing, reasoning, interpreting data, formulating hypothesis. It is necessary for teachers to make an effort to teach according to steps of the small group inquiry skills and to support inquiry activities, in order to increasing the science process skills. However, frequency of additional lessons have a little influence on increasing the science process skills. Second, there is meaningful change in the attitudes toward science for those who studied the small group inquiry skills. Also, they affected subordinate factors of the attitudes toward science, like the attitudes toward science inquiry, the happiness about science class. This study shows that the small group inquiry skills give a positive influence on the science process skills and attitudes toward science in elementary school science.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.783-790
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• 2016

The 'Integrated Inquiry' unit is a new addition in the 5th~6th grade science textbooks, and was developed for the 2009 revised national curriculum. The unit deals with six integrated inquiry process skills: problem cognition, formulating hypotheses, controlling variables, transforming and interpreting data, drawing results, and generalization. The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions and the teaching practices of elementary school teachers on this unit in their school curriculum and where improvements can be made. Data was collected from questionnaires filled out by 92 elementary school teachers. The results are as follows: First, teachers do have a positive perception on the importance of teaching integrated process skills. Second, with that being true, this unit ended up receiving both positive and negative reviews by teachers. This research found that there were good and bad responses on the educational aspects of this unit in three particular areas: dealing with the development of integrated inquiry process skills, facilitating science learning in other units, and implementing open inquiry. Third, teachers have difficulties particularly in problem cognition, formulating hypotheses, controlling variables, transforming and interpreting data, generalization, and drawing results. There is a lack of student understanding as well as a lack of professionalism for teachers on this unit, and many issues related to the composition of the textbook. This study may have important implications for making improvements in this unit and teaching integrated process skills.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.490-500
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• 2012

This study was to examine elementary male and female students' spatial abilities, science process skills, and graph construction and interpretation abilities in order to understand the effect that their spatial abilities and science process skills would have on their graph abilities. To conduct this study, total 12 classes of 435 pupils, 6 classes each from grades 5 and 6 in elementary schools were selected for subjects. The number of male student was 207 and that of female one was 228 of them. And previous test papers of spatial abilities, of science process abilities, and of graph abilities were retouched and updated for reuse in new tests. The results of this study are briefed as follows: Firstly, when spatial abilities for male and female group were compared, female group showed a little higher rate of correct answering than male, but not providing statistically significant gap. Secondly, the science process skill tests revealed basic process skills of both groups were more excellent than their integrated process skills, while female group was found to have more correct answers than male, all of which were proving statistical distinction. Thirdly, of graphing skills for two groups, the graph interpretation skills turned out to be better than the graph construction skills, with female group scoring higher than male and with meaningful difference. Fourthly, both between spatial abilities and graph abilities, and between science process skills and graph abilities, static correlations existed with statistical meaning. In other words, those with higher spatial abilities or science process skills were to do better in constructing and interpreting graphs.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.442-453
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• 2016

The aims of this study are to develop a STEAM program focused on the appearances of birds' beaks and insectivorous plants and to identify its influence on elementary students' basic scientific process skills, creative problem solving ability and affective domain. For these objectives, the STEAM program was developed by reorganizing contents of the appearances of animals and plants in the units of 'Life of Animals' and 'Life of Plants' from 2009 revised national science curriculum for 3th and 4th grades. The developed STEAM program was applied to twenty nine 3th grade students of J elementary school located in S city. As a result of applying the STEAM program, the experimental group in this study showed significant improvements of the creative problem solving ability, scientific process skills and affective domain compared to the control group's scores. Therefore, development studies on STEAM programs integrated different science fields using animals and plants could be meaningful works to encourage elementary students' skills and interest.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.624-633
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• 2005

Line graphs are frequently used to communicate data and basic concepts in classroom activities, Science teachers often assume that students are able to interpret the symbolic meaning of the graphs, but such an assumption is not based on sufficient evidence, The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships of graphing ability to science-process skills and academic achievement of high school students: With regard to science-process skills, graphing ability was found to have a slight correlation with science-process skills (.41). Among the sub-skills of the science-process, graphing ability was seen to have a relatively high correlation with basic science-process skills such as 'measuring', 'inferring', 'predicting', while having relatively low correlation with integrated science-process skills such as 'formulating hypothesis' and 'generalization', With regard to academic achievement, graphing ability appeared to have no correlation with academic achievement (.06). Hence, a correlation between graphing ability and science-process skills was proved. It can also be concluded that improving graphing ability will greatly support students with their science study and, therefore, organized efforts and efficient educational methods should be developed in order to overcome the insufficient graphing ability among high school students.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.253-265
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• 2014

This study was aimed to find the impact of science lessons using e-NIE on science process skills and scientific attitudes of elementary students in comparison with that of traditional lessons. Subjects of this study were 5th graders from two separate classes at a elementary school located in U city. And the experiment has been conducted throughout 10 lessons for the duration of total 12 weeks, where one class, experimental group, attended e-NIE based lessons, while the other, comparative group, with traditional lessons for the same period, in an effort to collect both pre and post test results to compare. Findings from this study were briefly listed below: Firstly, e-NIE applied lessons were more effective in improving science process skills than traditional lessons, especially in the domain of integrated science process skills, with meaningful difference. Secondly, lessons combined with e-NIE enhanced scientific attitudes of elementary students more than traditional lessons with meaningful difference.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.180-185
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to inquire the properties and relationship of attitudes toward science and process skills of preservice elementary teachers. Two instruments were used to collect the data, SAS(Science Attitude Scales) for checking up attitude toward science and TIPS II(Test of Integrated Process Skill II) for inspecting science process skills. Three main results were revealed. First, preservice elementary teachers' the attitude toward science and science process skills could not show the significant differences by gender. This result is differ from the results of preceding researches which had set up the students of elementary, middle and high school as objects. Second, the properties of preservice elementary teachers' the attitude toward science and science process skills according to the course in high school were also differ from those of preceding researches having students as objects. The preservice elementary teachers who got the literary courses in high school were more confident in science learning and perform that those who have the academic background of science courses in high school. In addition, although they showed better abilities in two sub-scales of science process skills, the preservice teachers with science course didn't show the better science process skills than those who had taken the literary course in total score of science process skill test. Third, there was a significant relationship between attitude toward science and science process skills of preservice elementary teachers but just one sub-scale was related with science process skills. According to these results, it can be said that the preceding results with students as objects can not be applied to and preservice elementary teachers should be guided by the methods which are considering their special properties.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.69-92
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• 1997

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of the enrichment program for the gifted on gifted childrens development of the logical thinking and science process skills. The enrichment program consists of 200 enrichment courses in language arts, mathematics, sciences, social sciences and thinking for children at the age of 30 months to Grade 8. Enrichment programs are characterized as process-oriented, student-choice available, activities-oriented, open-ended, and interdisciplined. Subjects were 123 gifted children from Grade 1 to 3 at the Korean Academy of Gifted Education (KAGE), whose IQ scores were above 130 at their entry point to KAGE. Children were divided into two groups depending the duration of the program participation. Older Group participated in the program for longer than 13 months, while Newer Group did for shorter than 12 months. Mean of IQs of the two groups were not significantly different. They were tested on Logical Thinking Test and Integrated Process Skills Test revised by KEDI into Korean version in 1991. Descriptive statistics were calculated and group differences were analyzed with t-test, and scheffe test. The main finding were as follows: There were not significant differences between gender. Children in higher grades showed higher level of development. Older groups showed significantly higher level of logical thinking level of development. Older group showed significantly higher level of logical thinking and process skills than the Newer group inspite of the similar IQ levels to each other. The longer the gifted child participate in the enrichment program, the higher the development of childrens thinking skills.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.45-53
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• 1997

The purpose of this study was to investigate the instructional effects of a problem solving model on students' achievement, science process skills, and perceptions of science activities. The problem solving model was developed on the basis of the SSCS (Search, Solve, Create, Share) problem solving model while considering Korean educational situations under a national curriculum. The model developed is composed of 4 stages; identify, solve, create, and share. In this research, the treatment and control groups (6 classes) were selected from a middle school in Seoul and taught about the separation of mixture for four weeks. Prior to instruction, the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking and the Learning Approach Questionnaire were administered, and their scores were used as covariate and blocking variable, respectively. During instruction, classroom observations for each group were conducted with a researcher-made checklist. Immediately following the instructions, students' achievement, science process skills, and perceptions of science activities were measured by a researcher-made achievement test, the Middle Grades Integrated Science Process Skills Test(MIPT), and the Perceptions of Science Activities Questionnaire, respectively. The results indicated that students in the treatment group achieved significantly better than those in the control group. Although students in the treatment group were found to use more science process skills correctly during their science activities, the MIPT scores of the treatment group were not significantly higher than those of the control group. No interaction with students' learning approach was found for both students' achievement and science process skills. On the questionnaire of students' perceptions of science activities, the treatment group showed more positive perceptions and interest than the control group. Educational implications are discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.725-739
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships of graphing abilities to logical thinking and science process skills of middle school students. The subjects for this study were selected 481 students from four middle schools for TOGS(the Test of Graphing in Science), GALT(Group Assessment of Logical Thinking) and TIPS II (Test of Integrated Process Skills). This study shows that the correlation coefficient between abilities of students to construct/interpret graphs and the logical thinking was 0.45, and the correlation coefficient between abilities to construct/interpret graphs and science process skills are 0.32. As a result, abilities of students to construct and interpret graphs arc more correlate the logical thinking than science process skills.