The following experiment was designed to test the students' involvement in the interactive activities and objectives of the relevant chapters in the newly revised curriculum of 2007. The experiment was carried out with the purpose of understanding the level of participation of the Grade 9 students who have successfully completed the Grade 8 "Choice of Food and Diet" and "Table Manners and Dining Etiquette" courses with classified materials such as tables/diagrams/pictures, reading, and activity resources from Technology Home Economics textbooks. The chapters "Choice of Food and Diet" and "Food Preparation and Etiquette" generally emphasize the practical and experiential part of domestic life through using various activity resources; while the tables/diagrams/pictures and reading materials do not provide the students with first-hand experience, they support the students' learning by explaining the basic knowledge required for doing the activities and solving various problems. Within the main training courses, the objectives which the students achieved the highest marks were(in a descending order) "Table Manners and Dining Etiquette" (3.24), "Checking Nutrition Labels, Food Expiration Date, Country of Origin When Buying Food" (3.18), Additionally "Making Food" and "Planning a Healthy, Balanced Diet" hardly met the goals, the result of which shows clear relations to the well achieved objectives from the list of in-class activities that students directly participated in. Therefore, in order to increase the students' interest in the Food and Diet section of Technology Home Economics textbooks, it is recommended to encourage the students to actively engage in the class activities by developing various learning resources and teacher education/pedagogical materials, rather than following the conventional lecture-based teaching methods.
This study explored pre-service teachers' mental models about eclipse phenomena to investigate their understandings on the earth science concept needed f3r an integrated approach. We conducted in-depth interviews with two different contexts on 30 secondary and 36 primary pre-service teachers participants, and analyzed phenomenological primitives (p-prims) and facets of causal explanations about eclipses. Based on this study, we identified four different levels of mental models about eclipses. Four mental models were categorized as (1) Screening model, (2) Orbital plane model, (3) Hybrid model, and (4) Shadow cast model. Screening model is a flawed mental model, orbital plane model is an incomplete correct mental model, and shadow cast model is a scientifically correct mental model. Hybrid model, composite of two or more mental models, use multiple mental models simultaneously. Orbital plane model was the most widespread mental model in secondary pre-service teachers group, whereas screening model was used frequently in primary group. It was found that the level of mental model could be determined by the level of facet and p-prims. We confirmed context sensitivity of the mental models and perceived the necessity of integrated approaches to promote progression of mental models. Implications of our findings for enhancing pre-service science teachers' topic-specific pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) associated with eclipse phenomena are also discussed here.
This research investigated the Revised mathematics curriculum and the National Achievement Test of Japan that advanced by leaps and bounds in PISA 2012. As compared with Korea, Japan shows similar trends in the affective domain and the cognitive domain of international achievement test. To put it concretely, this research compared and analyzed the mathematics contents domain of the 2009 revised mathematics curriculum of Korea and the 2008 revised mathematics curriculum of Japan being applied. The analysis was conducted in many aspects including overall of Japanese mathematics education system, the contents to be covered in each grade, and the methods of essential learning themes. We compared the mathematics contents dealt with each country based on the framework of analysis such as