• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.610-623
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• 2005

This was a theoretical study of which the goal was to provide a foundation for developing and implementing earth science inquiry activities based on abduction as a scientific inquiry method. Through a review of relevant literature, the study examined the nature of earth science in terms of the goals of earth science inquiry and the characteristics of what is investigated in earth science. It also explored the forms and meanings of abduction, thinking strategies used in the abductive inference, and the abductive inquiry model. Abduction is the process of inferring certain rules (e.g., scientific facts, principles, laws) and providing explanatory statements or hypotheses in order to explain some phenomena. This method was found to be well-suited to the earth science inquiry which studies the causes and processes of natural phenomena in the earth and space environment. Abduction has the nature of ampliative, selective, evaluative, and creative inference, and several thinking strategies, including reconstruction of data, heuristic generalization, analogy, existential, conceptual combination, and elimination strategies, are employed for inferring rules and suggesting hypotheses. This study found the abductive inquiry model to be adaptable to earth science classrooms, and it is therefore suggested that earth science instructions should be based on the abductive method and that research work concerning the abductive inquiry in the classroom should follow.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.901-919
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to analyze abductive reasoning on the inquiry of scientists and elementary school gifted children in science. Subjects for this study were eight scientists and eight elementary school gifted children in science studying in the Academy of Gifted Child Education in Science affiliated with Seoul National University of Education. As a result, abductive reasoning on the scientific inquiry of scientists and gifted children showed the three stages of generating hypotheses, designing the experiments, and interpreting the results. The abductive reasoning in each stage characterized the five types as complex abduction, analogical abduction, observation-based abduction, logic-based abduction, selective abduction. The sub-reasoning process of the abductive reasoning of gifted children in science differed in some ways from that of scientists. First, for most scientists, representing a method or representing a casual explican appeared after searching for the characteristics of variables but for gifted children in science, searching for the characteristics of variables appeared after representing a method. Second, scientists tend to rely on logic-based abduction but gifted children in science tend to rely on observationbased abduction. Third, scientists reason by the similar rate in three steps: generating the hypothesis, designing the experience, interpreting the results. On the other hand, most gifted children in science reason about designing the experience.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.88-98
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to analyze the process of scientists' science knowledge generation by employing four creative scientists as participants. Raw protocols were collected by an intensive interview method and then analyzed by a psychological modelling procedure. The present study showed that the process of knowledge generation divided into the processes of inductive, abductive, and deductive thinking. Furthermore, the inductive process in simple and operative observation was involved in the processes of generating a question, conjecture/prediction, designing an operational method, operation, and simple observation. Also, the abductive process had two components; question generation, and hypothesis generation which consisted of analyzing questions, searching explicans, and constructing hypothesis. Finally, the deductive process involved inventing abstract test methods, inventing abstract criteria, inventing concrete test methods, inventing concrete criteria, collecting results, and evaluating hypotheses and stating conclusions.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.458-469
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• 2003

Hypothesis is defined as a proposition intended as a possible explanation for an observed phenomenon. The purpose of this study was to generate a grounded theory on the process of undergraduate students' generating hypothesis-knowledge about scientific episodes. Three hypothesis-generating tasks were administered to four college students majored in science education. The present study showed that college students represented five types of intermediate knowledge in the process of hypothesis generation, such as question situation, hypothetical explicans, experienced situation, causal explicans, and final hypothetical knowledge. Furthermore, students used six types of thinking methods, such as searching knowledges, comparing a question situation and an experienced situation, borrowing explicans, combining explicans, selecting an explican, and confirming explicans. In addition, hypothesis-generating process involves inductive and deductive reasoning as well as abductive reasoning. This study also discusses the implications of these findings for teaching and evaluating in science education.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.257-270
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to develop elementary students' ability to generate hypothesis knowledge through knowledge generation learning in science. The learning program consisted of a series of 28 activities to generate hypotheses in science. Eighty 6th grade students participated in the study and were divided into experimental and control groups. The experimental group was administered a program geared towards hypothesis generation learning and the control group was administered a program aimed at hypothesis expository learning in elementary science. After using the respective programs, subjects in both groups were tested in terms of their abilities in abductive knowledge generation and administered a descriptive self-report regarding their generation of hypotheses. Two of the 28 activity program worksheets in the experimental group were analyzed in terms of the quality and process of students' hypothesis generation. The results were as follows: 1) The experimental group showed significantly higher scores in terms of scientific knowledge generation (i.e. abductive knowledge generation) than the control group. 2) The degree of hypothesis explanation in the experimental group was significantly higher than in the control group in terms of the quality of the generated hypotheses. In addition, students in the experimental group generated more varied and valid knowledge than the control group in terms of sub-knowledge of hypothesis generation. Therefore, it can be argued that this program for hypothesis knowledge generation in elementary science students was effective in the generation of hypothesis knowledge.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.128-142
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• 2011

The goal of this study was to investigate how hypotheses were elaborated after their initial appearances in the context of scientific problem solving. Data were collected from a class in which preservice elementary school teachers in groups carried out abductive inquiry of earth science. The analysis revealed two major processes of hypothesis elaboration: theory-driven and evidence-driven. The theory-driven process was in turn distinguished into two kinds of subprocesses: one is in pursuit of internal coherence and the other external coherence. The evidencedriven elaboration also had two subprocesses, which were triggered by direct evidence and indirect or analogical evidence, respectively. In addition, hypotheses were more often than not modified by a wrong theory or evidence whether it was driven by a theory or evidence. Implications for science education and related research were discussed.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.37 no.4
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• pp.372-390
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• 2018

The purpose of this research is to know the scientific reasoning ability of elementary students. In order to find it, 320 elementary students wrote a report about germination of the 700 or 2,000 years old seeds. Their writings were analyzed by scientific writing analysis frameworks, Scientific Reasoning Types and Scientific Reasoning Level Criteria developed by Lim (2018). Minto Pyramid Principles was used to show statements and relations of statements related to scientific reasoning. This paper showed scientific reasoning statements of elementary students about germination of seeds. The characteristics of scientific reasoning of elementary students were as follows. In the process of logical writing by the types of scientific reasoning, many students showed various characteristics and different levels. In the writings based on inductive reasoning, they did not distinguish between common features and differences of cases, and did not derive the rules based on common features and differences of the cases. In the writings based on deductive reasoning, there were cases where the major premise corresponding to the principle or rule was omitted and only the phenomenon was described, or the rule was presented but not connected with the case. In the writings based on abductive reasoning, the ability to selectively use the background knowledge related to the question situation was not sufficient, and borrowing of similar background knowledge, which was commonly used in other situations, was very rare.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.250-257
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to test the hypotheses that student's abductive reasoning ability plays an important role in hypothesis-generating about vapor condensation, and student's hypothesis-generating requires their causal explicans as well as experience. To test the hypotheses, the instruments of hypothesis-generation, prior knowledge, and experience with vapor condensation were developed and administered to 6th grade students. This study found that 72 subjects among 89 students who had prior knowledge about vapor condensation failed to apply their prior knowledge to hypothesis-generating about the vapor condensation. This result showed that the students' failure in hypothesis-generating was related to their deficiency in abductive reasoning ability. In addition, this study showed that 54 subjects among 56 students who had experience with vapor condensation also failed to generate hypotheses. This result supported that student's causal explanations were separated from their experience. Therefore, this study suggests that science education should include the teaching of abductive reasoning skills for developing student's hypothesis-generating skills.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.770-787
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• 2011

The purpose of this study was to analyze science-gifted students' knowledge-generation processes by analyzing students' inquiry journal. As a result, first, science-gifted students showed various knowledge-generation processes, but they were limited to inductive thinking and abductive thinking, and their thinking processes were very simple. Second, most of the knowledge-generation processes of science gifted were simple, repetitive and diagrammatic processes because of observation and empirical situation of a limited scope. And a simple and repetitive diagram was generated by a simple variable selection and design, observation in limited scope, unbiased intervention by subjective thinking, and absence of exploration or finding errors. And they showed often a logical leap of reasoning.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.465-481
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• 2017

This study is a research synthesis analyzing how field geology education is conducted in domestic and foreign countries in the recent 20 years and how it reflects the characteristics of authentic geologic inquiry. For these purposes, we first drew five elements of inquiry in field geology (observation, representation, abductive reasoning, spatial thinking, and diachronic thinking) considering the field geologists' actual research method as well as its pedagogical significance in science education. We developed analysis criteria for field geology education. The 53 cases were analyzed based on each element of inquiry in field geology and its sub-elements, and also the tendency of overall elements. As a result, observation and representation were included in most cases, but there appeared less frequency in order of abductive reasoning, spatial thinking, and diachronic thinking. For observation, the ratio of purposive observation and autonomous observation is high. For representation, both visualizing and linguistic type of representation and free-form representation appear frequently. For abductive reasoning, the step of generating hypothesis is often included and the hypothesis tends to be about the geological formatting process. For spatial thinking, type of self-location and perception of the spatial configuration of the structure appear at a high rate. For diachronic thinking, type of stratigraphic sequence is the most frequent. The proportions of the cases including three or more elements of inquiry in field geology consist 87% of the total. We suggested implications for improving geological fieldwork as authentic science inquiry in the future.