• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.683-699
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to explore the characteristics of teacher learning and changes in teachers' epistemic beliefs within a learning community of elementary science teachers. Three in-service elementary teachers who majored in elementary science education in a doctoral course of a graduate school of education participated in the study, and learning activities in the teachers' beginning learning community provided a context for the study. Data sources included field notes produced by the researcher who engaged jointly in the teacher learning community as a coach, audio-recordings of the teachers' narratives, and artifacts generated by the teachers during the process of teacher learning. Complementary analyses of these multiple sources of data revealed that epistemic beliefs of the three elementary teachers were different and that each teacher made a different plan of science instruction based on his own epistemic belief even after the learning experiences within the teacher community. It was therefore suggested that science teacher education programs should be organized in consideration of the nature of teachers as constructivist learners and their practical resources.

• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.163-179
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• 2011

This study was conducted in an inclusion class in M Inclusion Day Care Center in Busan. Thirteen sessions of cooperation teaching were applied in the inclusion class. In this sense, the purpose of this study was to identify what kinds of change occurred in the perspectives of teachers' role on both the general education teacher and the special education teacher during cooperation teaching. The data were collected through participation observations, teachers' reflective journals, and interviews. From the results of the study, it could be suggested that various types of teaching strategies need to be introduced to both teachers from the beginning of inclusion so that the general teacher and the special education teacher could understand each others roles and tasks, share opinions and ideas about daily activities, and experience the roles of the other teacher.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.544-556
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to investigate the change in beginning science teachers' inquiry-oriented teaching practice through mentoring program. Participants in this study are three mentor teachers and three beginning teachers. The three beginning teachers are middle school science teachers who have less than four years teaching experience. Also three science teachers participated in the program as mentors, who have more than twelve years teaching experience. We collected data such as video recordings of beginning teachers' classes, lesson plans, recordings of one to one mentoring and RTOP class observation reports. Mentor teachers observed and analyzed five classes of each beginning teacher. Before the mentoring program, beginning teachers' teaching methods were more concept-oriented and teacheroriented. They rarely used inquiry-elements including prediction, reasoning, hypothesizing and students were not actively engaged in communicative interactions in a classroom. But during the mentoring program, these teachers recognized and responded to student diversity and encouraged all students to participate in science learning. Beginning teachers' teaching methods have changed to become student-oriented, teachers and students collaborated in pursuit of ideas, and students often initiated new activities relevant to an inquiry. As a result, this mentoring program provided beginning teachers the opportunities to reflect on their own teaching and reform their classes. The results show that school-centered mentoring program is helpful to enhance beginning science teachers' inquiry-oriented teaching ability.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.160-175
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• 2004

This study examined the knowledge and practices of scientific inquiry displayed by three student teachers and two beginning teachers at secondary levels. Observations using the instrument of OTOP designed by the research team of OCEPT (Oregon Collaborative for Excellent in the Preparation of Teachers) generalized similar teaching strategies of scientific inquiry between student and beginning teachers, such as using group work for students' first hand experience, using concrete materials for experimentation or visual tools for demonstration, using questions for factual knowledge mainly without opportunities to understand how scientific knowledge is constructed. Those scientific inquiry activities were very confirmative ones to follow the steps without opportunities of understanding nature of science or nature of scientific inquiry. However, all participants in this study hold knowledge of scientific inquiry envisioned by the National Science Education Standards [NSES] (NRC, 1996), where students identify their hypothesis, use critical and logical thinking, and consider alternative explanations through argumentation as well as experimentation. An inconsistent relationship between participating teachers knowledge and practices about scientific inquiry resulted from their lack of pedagogy skills of implementing it in the classroom. Providing opportunities for these teachers to reflect on their beliefs and practices about scientific inquiry was recommended for the future study. Furthermore, increasing college faculty interest in new teaching approaches for upgrading the content knowledge of student teachers and beginning teachers was recommended as a solution, since those teachers showed evidence of influence by college faculties at universities in their pedagogy skills.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.691-702
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• 2006

The purposes of the study are to portray Korean beginning secondary science teachers' ways of arranging science content, sense-making strategy, and factors contributing to the tensions between teachers' intentions and actual practice. Six beginning secondary science teachers participated in this study. Science classes taught by the participating teachers were observed and videotaped. Semi-structured interviews were conducted for science teachers participated in this study after science classes were observed. Instructional materials were also collected for each science class. Video- and audio-taped data were transcribed and analyzed using conceptual framework developed by the Michigan State University. The findings of this study produce the following conclusions: (1) beginning teachers' science classes are arranged in ways compatible to traditional school science, (2) frequently used sense-making strategies are procedural display and narrative reasoning, (3) tensions between beginning teachers' intentions and practice arise from two factors such as assessment and differences in educational views with peer teachers, and (4) learning experiences, lack of perceptions and preparations on reform science teaching, and the absence of systematic program for professional development programs for beginning science teachers are major obstacles to reform science teaching for beginning teachers.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.8
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• pp.1055-1076
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• 2011

In this study, we investigated the changes in beginning chemistry teachers' teaching practice without mentoring program and after the implementation of mentoring program. Participants in our study included two chemistry teachers who have less than one year of teaching experience and three mentor teachers. We collected data such as video recordings of teacher's classes, interview, and recordings of mentoring after each class. The results show there were slight changes in teaching contents, teaching procedure, and explanation method without mentoring. On the other hand, there were a lot of significant improvement in classroom environment, teaching contents and teaching procedure, teaching-learning techniques, questioning and feedback, and explanation method after mentoring has been implemented. However, there were no easy changes in the teaching style, understanding of students, and ways of interaction with students in connection with teaching purposes. Based on the results of this study, we explored the possibilities of instructional improvement through mentoring on beginning chemistry teacher's teaching practice. Therefore, we consider that more systematic and long-term mentoring is necessary to improve professionalism in teaching beginning teachers. In particular, we propose mentoring programs reflecting the individual needs of beginning teachers.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.360-379
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• 2005

The purpose of this study was to investigate beginning elementary teachers' beliefs about the nature of science. Defining teachers' beliefs as a broad construct, we tried to examine the teachers' understandings about the nature of science. The methodology of this study was a qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews. In an urban area of Korea, five beginning elementary teachers were chosen. The cross-case and grounded theory study design were adopted for the data analysis. The results of data analysis were checked by teachers for internal validity. This study identified the teachers' beliefs about the nature of science suggested by many researchers. The results of this study showed that: 1) beginning elementary teachers did not well understand and were unfamiliar with the meanings of various terms about the nature of science; 2) their beliefs abut the nature of science were broad and various; 3) they understood some parts of the nature of science; 4) there were differences within their understandings about subconcepts of the nature of science.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.302-314
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• 2019

This study is a hermeneutic phenomenological study on the experiences of 10 beginning science teachers who have been building positive or negative identity as teachers for the first 3 months. This study was conducted by four steps of the phenomenological qualitative research process suggested by Yeu (2015) based on the study of hermeneutic phenomenology suggested by van Manen (1990). The main data of this study is the transcription data of the telephone interviews collected in consideration of the working area of the research subjects. The main theme is found by categorizing and conceptualizing the meaning of the phenomenon revealed in the data and the process of confirming the legitimacy of the main theme. The results of this study show that the experiences of beginning science teachers that could affect their positive identity as teachers have common moments when they realize that 'I am a necessary person for someone'. On the other hand, the teachers create negative teacher identity when they doubt their teaching competency, particularly when they are not confident about their attitudes toward students or when they are unable to engage students actively in lessons. The results of this study provide important implications for pre-service science teacher preparation program in Korea.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.33 no.7
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• pp.1329-1342
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• 2013

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between the change of beginning teachers' beliefs about a lesson and that of teaching practice and argument-based inquiry using science writing. Participants were three science teachers (A, B, and C) from different middle schools. Classroom observation and interview data were collected and transcribed for analysis. A Summary Writing test was also administered to examine whether there was an improvement in students' learning. The results indicated that the interaction between the teachers and their students developed, which is concluded as an improvement in the teaching practice. Teacher A and B also reported that teacher-student interaction had improved. Teacher A and C came to understand that argument-based inquiry using science writing classes constituted learner-centered instruction. The result from the Summary Writing Test showed the impact of the changes in teaching practice and in teachers' awareness of students' learning as well as produced meaningfully higher scores than compared groups on the rhetorical structure of all the specific areas in teacher A's school and on the scientific concept at B and C's schools.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.109-124
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• 2012

Developing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has been emphasized for teacher's professionalism and it should be done from systematic teacher training courses. In this study, we investigated changes of elementary pre-service teachers' PCK of science teaching and motivational strategies before and after a training course. For the analysis of pre-service teachers' PCK, their lesson plans, surveys, and interviews were collected. According to the results, in the beginning of the semester, pre-service teachers in the experimental group usually used didactic or combination of didactic and inquiry teaching strategies and a few pre-service teachers used inquiry or discovery teaching strategies when making lesson plans. However, at the end of the semester many pre-service teachers used inquiry teaching strategies in their lessons which included activities of asking students' prior knowledge, conducing experiments, finding conclusion, and comparing teachers' explanations with students' explanations. Regarding motivational strategies, in the beginning of the semester they focused using activities to create student's emotional interest in science lesson but at the end they used other strategies to create positive atmosphere for learning, capture intellectual interest in science, and connect science to students' everyday lives. The changes in pre-service teachers' PCK in the experimental group was meaningful because there was less change in pre-service teachers' PCK in the control group. This study implies the need for effective professional development programs for developing pre-service teachers' PCK.