• 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 Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.271-280
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to investigate how free inquiry activities affects the scientific process skills and scientific attitudes of 5th and 6th of elementary school students. For this study, 265 elementary students from 5th and 6th grade in Seoul were selected. In comparison group 130 students were implemented and to the experimental group 135 students who did not the free inquiry activities were implemented. The result of this study is as follows: First, curiosity was the most affective factor that motivate free inquiry activities and made them select their topics. Most of the students invested for the inquiry activity in less than 3 weeks. They had some help in every stages. Students became interested in free inquiry activities because they learned new facts and enjoyed doing experiments and they wanted to continue for the same reasons. Second, free inquiry activities had little effect on the basic science process skills of the experimental group, compared to the control group at the significant difference of p=0.05. Third, free inquiry activities had considerable effect on the integrative inquiry process skills of the experimental group, compared to the control group at the significant difference of p=0.05. Fourth, the result of the post-test of the experimental group showed that free inquiry activities had no effect on scientific attitudes at the significant difference of p=0.05. In conclusion, free inquiry activities will be much more effective in developing integrative inquiry process skills than in developing basic scientific process skills and scientific attitudes.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.501-510
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• 2005

An analysis was done on the “inquiry sections” of Earth Science chapters of 10th grade science textbooks. The Inquiry sections were classified into different types and the frequencies of basic process skills, integrated process skills, and inquiry activities were measured in section to find out whether they sufficiently satisfy the requirements based on the 7th National Curriculum. The number of selected science textbooks that have been used in high school for this study were eleven. The number of inquiry tasks were on an average of 24.0. The types of inquiry sections and the elements of basic and integrated process skills were different in every textbooks. The number of inquiry activities were also different and analyzed more than those presented. They were not integrated activities but presented as scientific process skills. The basic process skills and integrated process skills presented in textbooks were $16\%\;and\;77.2\%$, respectively. However, the distribution of two kinds of process skills were analyzed to be $45.6\%\;and\;55.4\%$, respectively. In the process skills, the frequencies of inferring $(49.5\%)$ and data interpretation (68.7%) were the highest; however, the other process skills including recognizing problem, formulating hypothesis and generalization were not even presented in any of the text books. Due to the lack of the definitions of Science process skills and inquiry activities in the 7th National Curriculum, each text book defined these terms differently. It suggests that the meaning of inquiry, science process skills, and inquiry activities should be operationally defined in the national curriculum and the criteria for construction of inquiry activities are required.

• 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.32 no.2
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• pp.236-264
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to provide teachers with sub-components of inquiry skills and help them to give direct instructions on the skills to their students. Inquiry skills and strategies are considered by-products of science and inquiry instruction by most of the science teachers. On the other hand, much research shows that many students are not familiar with the way that they can use inquiry skills therefore direct instruction on the inquiry skills is needed. The lack of guidance on the sub-components for the inquiry skills, however, results in science teachers' ignorance of the inquiry skills. As shown in the previous studies which suggest that without teachers' guidance, students cannot acquire the intended skills, and it is necessary to inform science teachers of the necessity for direct instruction on the inquiry skills and strategy as well as give them the sub-components of the inquiry skills. On the basis of the results from the previous research on the inquiry skills, this study presents the sub-components of basic inquiry skills (observation, classification, measure, prediction, and reasoning) and integrated inquiry skills (problem recognition, hypothesis formulation, control of variables, data transformation, data interpretation, drawing conclusion, and generalization).

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.32 no.8
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• pp.1367-1377
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• 2012

Inquiry activity is a major source of student investigation which both of the national curriculum standards strongly emphasize for achieving scientific literacy. The purpose of this study was to examine inquiry activities incorporated in high school biology textbooks used in China and Korea. The inquiry activities were examined with regard to inquiry level and science process skills. Bell's and a modification of Padilla's framework were used in these analyses. Results show that the Korean textbooks were more exclusively occupied by simple inquiry activities - None of them provided activity more complex than level 2 inquiry. In addition, the Korean textbooks had uniformly basic science process skills, whereas their Chinese counterparts gave students some challenges for higher level process skills. Therefore, it cannot be guaranteed that the activities in the Korean textbooks are helpful in guiding students toward a gradual progression to high-level inquiry. Implications for inquiry-based science education were suggested based on the results of the study.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.579-587
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• 2014

In National Curriculum of Science revised in 2007, 'Free Inquiry' was newly introduced to increase student's interest in science and to foster creativity by having students make their own questions and find answers by themselves. The purpose of the study was to analyze characteristics deployed in the processes of elementary school students' free inquiry activities applying a brain-based evolutionary science teaching and learning principles. For this study, 106 the fifth grade students participated, and they performed individually free inquiry activities according to a brain-based evolutionary approach. In order to characterize the diversifying, estimating-evaluating-executing, and extending-applying activities in behavioral domain, the free inquiry diary constructed by the students, observations by the researcher, and interviews with the students were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The major results of this study were as follows: First, the students preferred basic inquiry process skills and the majority of the students selected observation as a major approach of their inquiry. The reason was found to be that they were accustomed to only typical basic inquiry skills which is frequently presented at textbooks and regular instruction and didn't have appropriate experience for using relevant integrative inquiry skills. Second, most of the methods diversified and selected by the students were confined to descriptive explanation rather than causal one. Third, both of the science attitude and academic achievement were associated with the number of diversified methods and the selection of appropriate method. Based on these findings, implications for supporting domain novices in inquiry learning environments are advanced.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.318-333
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• 2017

In this study, we analyzed activities in life science chapters of middle school 'science' textbooks for the 2009 revised Korea national curriculum and examined the difference between the analysis based on scientific practices and the analysis based on inquiry skills. As a results, there was a lot of inquiry skills in the order of 'reasoning', 'observing', 'classification' in the all of grade. In scientific practices, 'data analysis and interpretation' and 'constructing explanations and devising problem solving' were biased. This shows that life science inquiry activities in middle school 'science' textbooks are lacking in diversity in scientific practice elements as well as inquiry skills, and that the goals of the activities are limited. In addition, through the interrelationships between scientific inquiry skills and scientific practice elements, we examined contents relevance in the transition from inquiry function center to scientific practice, and compared with the results of inquiry activities in textbook, The results of this study were matched monotonously due to the tendency to basic inquiry-data interpretation / basic inquiry-explanation. This comes from results of the lack of diversity in activities presented in middle school 'science' textbooks. In this study, it is suggested that efforts should be made to include diverse scientific practice elements in the process of realizing 2015 revised Korea national curriculum from the simple and diversity-less inquiry activity through analyzing the textbooks of the 2009 revised Korea national curriculum.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.213-223
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• 2012

This study explored practicing elementary school teacher's beliefs of scientific inquiry and scientific inquiry teaching methods. Defining teacher's beliefs as a broad construct, we tried to examine the teachers' understandings about the scientific inquiry and scientific inquiry teaching method. This study drew on interview data from 10 elementary teachers in busan and changwon area of korea. Conclusions of this study include; First, we found that elementary teacher's beliefs of inquiry were represented variously. And they considered that inquiry is the important goal of science education. They though that the goal of science education is development of Scientific inquiry skills, Scientific thinking skills, development of Creativity and problem solving ability, increasing interest about science, understanding of the basic concepts of science and apply of real-life. second, most of the teachers though that Scientific inquiry is scientists activities, they defined 'the process of creation of new knowledge', 'the process of deriving theory', 'solving process of intellectual curiosity', 'Problem-solving process'. third, they considered that teaching method of scientific inquiry is open inquiry activities. however, they thought that there are many difficulties to actually apply. Understanding teachers' beliefs has implications for both the enactment of inquiry teaching in the classroom as well as the uptake of new teaching behaviors during professional development, with enhanced outcomes for engaging students in Science.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.202-212
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• 2004

The purpose of this study was to examine the connection among inquiry activities related to 'Metabolism' presented in life science textbooks developed according to the national common basic curriculum. To perform this, the type, process and context of inquiry activities of life science textbooks were analyzed. The number of inquiry activities is gradually increased from elementary to secondary school. As result of analysis, types, processes and skills, and context of inquiry were not balanced according to textbooks and school levels. It is suggested that the framework of evaluating inquiry activities based on curriculum objectives be provided when developing science textbooks. It also implies that teachers need to reconstruct inquiry contents and activities suitable to school situations when they teach in the real fields of education.