• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.249-258
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• 2005

The purpose of this study was to identify the type of thinking and generating processes of causal questions which were generated in preservice elementary teachers' observing activities. To find the generating processes of causal questions, 4 observing tasks, the task of grapes in soda, the candlelight, the celery, and the rock tasks, were administered to 7 preservice elementary teachers majoring in science education. The results of this study were as follows: The types of thinking in generating explicans exploration questions were classified as 8 types and explicans verification questions were classified as 9 types. The generating processes of explicans exploration questions were classified as 6 steps and explicans verification questions were classified as 5 steps. The results of this study may be used as a teaching strategy for guiding the direction and the method of scientific questions and developing the teaching-teaming programs that help student to generate scientifc questions.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.482-494
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to introduce a practical model to enhance creative and critical thinking skills through hypotheses generating activities for students. The 2007 Science National Curricula stresses the need for the enhancement of creative thinking skills for our students. The definition for the creativity in the narrow sense is the divergent thinking skills. The definition of the critical thinking skills is the strong sense of those skills. This model shows the use of the divergent thinking skills and convergent thinking skills together. The divergent thinking skills has been developed by making three alternative explanations about the causal question within a group of students by active discussion. The following procedure includes the selection of the most provable of the three explanations within a group of students also by active discussions. This process needs convergent thinking skills as well as critical thinking skills. This model can be used easily by exchanging from the one explanation about the causal question in any inquiry teaching strategy to three explanations about one. Although the partial modified strategy shows a small difference from any inquiry teaching strategy, but the effect of the enhancement of the creative thinking skills for our students shows significantly better (p<.05). More detailed study will be carried out in the near future.

• 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.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.173-185
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• 2019

Causal questions are prevalent in scientific research, for example, how effective a treatment was for preventing an infectious disease, how much a policy increased utility, or which advertisement would give the highest click rate for a given customer. Causal inference theory in statistics interprets those questions as inferring the effect of a given intervention (treatment or policy) in the data generating process. Causal inference has been used in medicine, public health, and economics; in addition, it has received recent attention as a tool for data-driven decision making processes. Many recent datasets are observational, rather than experimental, which makes the causal inference theory more complex. This review introduces key concepts and recent trends of statistical causal inference in observational studies. We first introduce the Neyman-Rubin's potential outcome framework to formularize from causal questions to average treatment effects as well as discuss popular methods to estimate treatment effects such as propensity score approaches and regression approaches. For recent trends, we briefly discuss (1) conditional (heterogeneous) treatment effects and machine learning-based approaches, (2) curse of dimensionality on the estimation of treatment effect and its remedies, and (3) Pearl's structural causal model to deal with more complex causal relationships and its connection to the Neyman-Rubin's potential outcome model.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.215-228
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• 2003

The present study is to analyze the arguments about the generation of declarative scientific-knowledge in the philosophy of science and invent a structured model of the process of scientific-knowledge generation with the types of the generated scientific-knowledge. The invented model shows that scientific-knowledge generation is a distinctive process with the processes of inductive, abductive, and deductive thinking. Furthermore, inductive process is included with observation, which is consisted of simple observation and operative observation, and rule-discovery which is involved with the processes of commonness discovery, classification, pattern discovery, and hierarchical relationship. Also, abductive process has two components. One component generates question and second component generates hypothesis in which the process consists of representing question situation, identifying experienced situation, identifying causal explicans, and generating hypothetical explicans. Finally, deductive process is involved with logical inventing test method and evaluation criteria, concrete inventing test method and evaluation criteria, evaluating hypothesis, and making conclusion.