• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.459-466
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• 2012

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of pre-service elementary teachers' understanding about scientific inquiry in terms of designing exploration and reasoning that is used to formulate explanations based on evidence. The research context was an open inquiry with using the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) template in which participant students were not provided with inquiry questions. As data, lab. 39 pre-service elementary teachers participated in this study while taking their science methods course. Analyses of the reports were framed by the cognitive processes of inquiry (Chinn and Malhotra, 2002) and each report was coded and analyzed by the framework of inquiry (Tytler and Peterson, 2004). Results showed that groups' works that utilized the SWH template encouraged the participants to interact each other about scientific inquiry. They came up with more relevant and testable questions for their scientific inquiry. It implicates that children will be able to have chances of testing their own questions more properly by using the SWH template in science classes just as the participants did in this study. The use of the SWH template would help pre-service teachers to teach appropriately how to test inquiry questions to their students in the future. Discussion was made to figure out the characteristics or Korean pre-service elementary teachers' understanding about scientific inquiry.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.903-927
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• 2012

The study aimed to analyze middle school students construction of physics inquiry problems for open inquiry from the viewpoint of variable isolation and clarification, and investigate students' difficulties during the processes of variable isolation and clarification to get implications for teaching and learning strategies for small group open inquiry activities which have been included in the 2007 national curriculum. The participants were 4 students who had attended an outreach program for the science gifted run by a university institution located in Seoul area. They performed an open inquiry on egg drop for 13 lessons for 30 hours. Level descriptions for variable isolation and clarification have been developed and applied to analyze students' inquiry problems and variables included by the problems. Students iterated inquiry processed 5 times and the inquiry problem showed progress gradually. Dependent variables have been isolated ahead and the levels of variable isolation and clarification showed higher than the independent variables. Many kinds of independent variables isolated extensively and the independent variables and control variables have been mingled. One of the reasons why students had some difficulties in isolation of independent variables could be the absence of theoretical models. The realities of school lab could restrict the variable isolation and clarification as well as topic selections. Some sensory or extensive variables such as broken eggs and drop height seem to be salient to be focused on as core variables. Lack of background knowledges could be one of the reasons for students' difficulties in variable clarification, such as theoretical definitions and operational definitions. As a result of lacking background knowledges, students could not construct theoretical models even though they could isolate and clarify variables as scientific lexical definitions. Some perceptions of inquiry as trial and error or reckless establishment of causal relations between variables could be accounted as one reason.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.565-578
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to search for the factors that influence students' understanding of the nature of science through the experience of the cognitive processes of authentic open inquiries. The freshmen of a science high school practiced authentic open inquiries reflecting epistemological characteristics of authentic science. The case study was conducted with four focus students who were successful or unsuccessful at learning the nature of science during the authentic open inquiry activity. Questions that the focus students asked during the inquiries as well as students' answers to pre- and post-VNOS (C type) were analysed, and then elaborated in the semi-structured interview. The findings suggest that open inquiry activities provide the inquiry contexts that help science high school students to understand the nature of science, and that the characteristics of students' cognition influence the understanding of the nature of science. For instance, designing experiments with their own research questions had an influence on the students' understanding about the scientific methods and the diversity of research types, and drawing conclusions from their own data made students experience scientific reasoning. In addition, the experience of collecting anomalous data helped students to understand the role of inferences in generating scientific knowledge and the creative nature of scientific knowledge. In this inquiry context, the reflective thinking that came from proactive discussion among students, made students think about the validity of the designing experiments and interpreting data, and helped them to understand the uncertain nature of reasoning and the diverse nature of scientific methods. Moreover, divergent thinking linked to analogical thinking helped students to understand the creative nature of science.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.448-460
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• 1999

Worksheets with various levels are major instructional material in open classroom, but sometimes they have been arbitrarily developed in elementaryschools. Especially, pedagogical elements of science course seem to have been neglected in developing science learning papers. To solve these problems, a model of worksheets was developed considering the contextual nature of science knowledge and educational constructivism. The frame of this model is composed of inquiry skill and context, which are two dimensions of each learning task. The level of each worksheet was determined by the level of inquiry skills and the familiarity of contexts.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.30-43
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• 2014

'Basic Inquiry' unit was newly included in the grade 3~4 science textbook developed for 2009 revised national curriculum. The unit deals with six basic inquiry skills such as 'observation', 'measurement', 'classification', 'prediction', 'inference', and 'communication'. This study investigated elementary school teachers' perceptions on the effects of 'Basic Inquiry' unit by questionnaires (N=104 for pre-survey, N=90 for post-survey). The results showed that how the teachers have taught basic inquiry skills before this new textbook and how they perceived the educational effects of the unit after experimental teaching period in three aspects; development of basic inquiry skills, facilitating science learning in other units, and implementation of open inquiry. The reasons of positive perceptions as well as negative perceptions were analyzed and discussed with the suggestions for further study.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.720-733
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• 2011

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an effective teaching-learning strategy for enhancing students' motivation, problem solving ability, and creativity. Its educational values coincide with the aim of open-inquiry activity introduced in 2007 revised national curriculum. From this aspect we designed the PBL open-inquiry program and implemented to 202 first year middle school students in Gyeonggi provincial office of education for one semester. We developed an energy related PBL problem. The program was designed in four steps: 'understand the problem,' 'investigate information,' 'solve the problem,' and 'present and evaluate the result.' Through the program, students did such activities as 'make Know/need to know chart,' 'group discussion,' 'search information,' and 'preparation of group report.' After completing the program, a survey was conducted to understand the students' perception of the program. The results are as follows: First, 40.6% of students showed positive attitude toward the program. Especially, students responded that 'make Know/need to know chart' was very useful. However, some students responded that 'search information' and 'preparation of group report' were difficult to perform. Second, male students showed positive attitude toward the PBL program compared to female students. Also students had higher scores in attitude toward science, showed more positive attitude toward the PBL program. Third, there was a significant correlation between attitude toward science and perception of PBL steps. Based on survey results, some suggestions were made for teachers who were planning to implement PBL in open-inquiry program.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.32 no.10
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• pp.1489-1501
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to search for effective strategies on teaching open-inquiry by comparing students' and teachers' recognition of its difficulties and helpful strategies. This study focused on the cases of science high school students and their teachers, who carried out open-inquiry to participate in KYPT. This research was conducted through participant observation, questionnaires, and interviews. The research findings were as follows: students stated that planning and doing experiments were the most difficult parts, whereas teachers viewed that their students had difficulties in analyzing data and making a conclusion. With respect to the effective strategy, students stated that they gained many ideas from peer discussions although they have had to carry out their individual tasks. On the contrary, teachers thought that reference materials and the discussions with teachers were most helpful. There were clear differences between students' and their teachers' recognition toward open-inquiry and the gap needs to be closed. Consequently, it would be useful to guide students to form teams and to spend more time in peer discussions especially when doing experiments and to encourage teachers to understand students' actual difficulties and needs.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.674-683
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• 1999

The purpose of this study was to compare the ideas of pupils with that of the scientists about controlling and identifying of variables, in the two cases: open or guided inquiry. The subjects were the 7th grade boys and girls in a school, in Seoul, Korea. For the guided inquiry, the problems were given by the experiments of pupils' text. Pupils were asked to identify the variables in the experiments. For the open inquiry, pupils set their own inquiry problem. The pupils whose marks are within upper one-third of three classes were chosen. Pupils' ideas on variables were investigated in the design of experiment for their problems. In that, questionnaire developed by researchers was used. In the former, many of the pupils identify just only one variable despite of the fact there were two independent or dependent variables in the experiments. In the latter, the number of independent variables increased two or three. However, pupils do not control independent variables: they vary two independent variables simultaneously in the design of experiment. From these, we compared the pupils' ideas on variables with the scientists'

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.303-319
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to investigate theoretically the meaning and features of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) based on the views of Peirce and Dewey, and to explore the implications of CoI in science education. The meaning and features of CoI are: (a) inquiry in CoI is initiated with faithful doubt; (b) inquiry in CoI finishes with faithful belief; (c) inquiry in CoI attempts to find out the best explanation and solution regarding the practical effects of objects; (d) as an ideal community, CoI is required to be one that inquires continuously without definite limits; (e) as an actual community, CoI requires its members' open communication to find the best explanation and solution. Based on these features of CoI, the Community of Inquiry in Science Classroom (CoI-SC), "the classroom community for the purpose of transforming the state of faithful doubt into the state of faithful belief, in relation to natural phenomena or objects, and where the members share objectives as participants continuously attempt to find out the best explanation and solution by open communication, considering fallibility and the practical effects of objects", was suggested. The condition for implementation of the CoI-SC, "'interest', 'openness', 'rigor', 'fallibilism', 'participation', 'inquiry without definite limits'", were also suggested. Finally, several suggestions for the science curriculum were given.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.124-135
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to find the relationship between elementary school teachers' beliefs of inquiry and science performance assessment. To collect data for analyzing elementary school teachers' beliefs of inquiry and their practice of science performance assessment, the researcher was surveyed with elementary school teachers by open-ended questionnaires and interview. The findings of this study were as follows; First, Most of elementary school teachers beliefs of inquiry was shown as constructivist tendency. This view of inquiry involves watching and doing experiments, and the skills of thinking processes, in which learners make their own interpretations rather than merely acquiring preexisting knowledge structures. Second, for content knowledge, participants' preception about the target of science performance assessment involved assessing application of science knowledge rather than basic level of substantive knowledge. For inquiry process, participants' preception about the target of science performance assessment involved assessing the lower level of inquiry rather than the higher level of inquiry. Most of participants was measured using a paper and pencil test for the actual evaluation methods due to the ease and objectivity of the assessment, the lack of understanding how to perform the performance evaluation process and method. Especially, participants who recognize that the higher level of inquiry was used performance and informal mode of assessing.