• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.47-57
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• 2021

This study aims to explore the epistemic goals that pre-service elementary teachers can construct in their biology-related knowledge construction activities, how these goals are constructed, and how the shaping of the knowledge construction activities around the goals was afforded or constrained. The research participants were 26 pre-service teachers, divided into 11 groups of two or three to engage in the activity. Their discussions and products were collected and used as data for this study. The analysis revealed that the teachers constructed three types of epistemic goals: making sense of natural phenomena, proposing the most effective course of action, and proposing solutions to problems based on their causes. Construction of different types of goals depended on the conclusions the pre-service teachers expected to draw based on the explored natural phenomena. It was found that the elicitation of the pre-service teachers' epistemic goals could facilitate their shaping of the knowledge construction activity as an evidence-based justification. The participants planned the construction of mechanistic explanations of natural phenomena with the epistemic goals of 'making sense of natural phenomena' or 'proposing solutions to problems based on their causes.' However, enacting their knowledge construction plans with sophisticated epistemic features was constrained due to the limited resources available. This study can contribute to developing instructional strategies that facilitate learners' epistemic agency and addressing epistemic agency in the development of pre-service teacher education methods.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.101-113
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• 2019

This study aims to explore which aspects of student agency have previously been studied and the ways agent practices have been investigated in learning communities in research on science education. Results reveal five aspects of agency related to students' actions in a learning community: epistemic agency, transformative agency, educated action in science, disciplinary agency, and material agency. We delineated how agency is captured in epistemic practices, as described in the literature on each of the aforementioned aspects. We also probed into the three approaches by which previous research has examined the practices of students as agents that construct learning communities. These approaches are (a) the investigation of students' actions as representative of the agency of an entire learning community, (b) the exploration of the effects of focused student action on the structure of activity, and (c) the investigation of interactions between students as agents. We discussed the implications of previous research on the basis of each approach to understanding the diverse features of student-centered learning communities. The present work contributes to the exploration and support of students' practices as agents in the learning communities in science classrooms.

• Language and Information
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• v.1
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• pp.227-276
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• 1997

There has been no nuanimous analysis of specific indefinites. It is still disputed even whether specificity is a matter of semantics of pragmatics. In this paper, I introduce some properties of specific indefinites, and explain them based on the meaning of specificity. Specificity intuitively means that the speaker or someone else in the context has some individual in mind, which is generally accepted among liguistics. The main issue is how to represent the meaning of 'have-in-mind'. I review some philosophical discusstions of cognitive contact and show that when the use of an expression involves 'have-in-mind', the expression is rigid designator in the belief of the agent who has an individual in mind. in the use of a specific indefinite, this applies only to the information state of the agent of 'have-in-mind'. To represent this asymmetry, I propose a new theory of dynamic semantics, in which a common ground consists of multiple information states, as many as the number of the participants in a conversation. Moreover, each information state is structured as a set of epistemic alternatives, which is a set of possible information states of a participant in the context. Based on this semantics, the properties of specific indefinites are explained.