• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.921-935
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• 2017

The purpose of this research is to investigate trends of science educational researches on underrepresented students by scrutinizing Korean science education research literatures. For this particular purpose, literatures on underrepresented students were extracted from both listed and candidate journals for KCI and theses from 1984 to February 2017, and analyzed criteria such as source, year of publication, design, method, and content of research. A total of 125 papers from journals and 147 theses were extracted. In these researches, 61%, 20%, 6% were about students with disability, underachievers, and North Korean defector students respectively. The ratio of the researches on other underrepresented students such as multicultural, low income families, students who are from rural areas, and other underrepresented students were less than 5%. According to the year of publication, it was found that the number of research papers on underrepresented students increased continuously by a single digit from 1984 by focusing on the students with disability and underachievers. After that, from around 2008, it showed a rapid increase and researches on underrepresented students carried out more than 20 times annually. With regards to research design, there were 58% quantitative, 28% qualitative and 14% hybrid research design. Through analysis of research methods, we found that 30% of experimental research, 22% of interpretive research, 20% of correlation analysis, and 14% of survey research. After going through the characteristics of the research contents by visualizing the relationship between the research groups and the keywords that were extracted, it was found that even though the science education researches on underrepresented students have various contents, there were no keywords that were researched continuously and intensively in this area. The structural relationship between the keywords and each research group on underrepresented students showed that 'academic achievement' is the keyword with the highest degree of mediateness and connectedness.