• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.119-130
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• 2019

The TIMSS assessment is conducted every four years, and Korean fourth grade cohort in TIMSS 2011 participated in TIMSS 2015 again as eighth graders, which produced the first achievement data of the cohort group of elementary and middle schools. In this study, in order to investigate the causes of the decline in Korean students' science achievement with grade changes from the fourth to the eighth grade, we analyzed educational context variables such as characteristics of students, teachers, and classroom instructions of the top 5 achievement countries participated in both TIMSS 2011 and TIMSS 2015. According to the results, students' sense of school belonging increased, whereas students' positive attitudes toward science teaching decreased with the grade change from the fourth to the eighth. As for the teacher characteristics, the teacher's professional development activity increased, and the teacher's confidence in science teaching showed similar tendency to the international average. Regarding classroom instruction characteristics, the frequency of inquiry-related science activities was highest at the fourth grade, and lower than the international average at the eighth grade. Based the results, we suggested implications for science teaching and learning as well as further studies including development of differentiated strategy by the school level to improve students' achievement, the necessity of converting into more student-engaging science classes, and the necessity of in-depth study on the teacher related educational contextual variables.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.48 no.6
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• pp.530-541
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• 2015

Purpose: This study was conducted to examine the prevalence of food allergy, food allergy knowledge, and perception on food allergen labelling along with management of substitute meals in school foodservice in elementary school students in Jeju, South Korea. Methods: Six elementary schools in Jeju-si were randomly selected, and the higher grade elementary school students (n=1,500), from fourth graders to sixth graders, were surveyed using a questionnaire in July 2014. A total of 1,000 responses were used for data analysis. Results: The percentage of students who had experienced food allergy was 16.7%; 26.4% had been diagnosed as having a food allergy by doctors. Milk, crabs, and shrimps were the most frequent allergenic foods with common symptoms including urticaria followed by itching, and vomiting. As the student's grade went up, the knowledge scores on food allergy showed a significant increase. Although students with and without food allergy experience had a similar level of knowledge on food allergy and perception on food allergen labelling, students with food allergy experience had a significantly lower level of healthy dietary practices. Last, only 20.4% of students with food allergies were offered substitute meals by school foodservices, and 30.8% of students received food allergy education. Conclusion: For prevention and management of food allergies in school foodservice, schools should provide an individualized substitute meal plan and food allergy education to students, parents, and teachers.

• Journal of Integrative Natural Science
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.143-148
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• 2011

This study was to promote the business of school dental health program in community area and to present the improvement of oral health between public health center's group of SungDong elementary school, one that started on March 1999, and the control group that is going to operate school oral health center from 2009 in primary school. It was based on the data of more than 10 years running school based oral health section. We compared the data of SungDong group with the one of control group to get a survey of dental caries experience. The preventive effect of the caries was estimated by the difference of DMFT indices between the sample group and control group. The experience rate of caries of the sample was 12.6 percentage lower than the control group and index of the experience rate of caries for the SungDong group was two times less. It showed that the sealing rate of the SungDong group composed of pit and fissure sealant was 67.7 percentage high. The prevention rate which was calculated by DMFT index was 46.34 percentage in the SungDong group that was the highest score for the fifth grade student as a 60.5 percentage. This program contributes to the improvement of the dental caries reduction in this school oral health promotion program.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.213-223
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to identify the types of essential inquiry activities presented in elementary science textbooks for grades 5-6, and to find out what difficulties teachers have in the actual teaching process. To this end, the essential research activities presented in the textbook were analyzed into six types: experimentation/observation, investigation/discussion and presentation, data interpretation, discussion/discussion, simulation activity, and expression. In addition, 108 elementary school teachers were investigated for the suitability of inquiry activity achievement standards, suitability at the student's level, student interest, and difficulty in teaching instruction. To summarize the research results, the most frequently suggested type was the experiment/observation type, followed by simulation activity type and data interpretation type. It was analyzed that there was no discussion/discussion type in the 5th grade textbooks, and the 6th graders did not present research activities that correspond to the research/discussion/presentation type and the expression type in the textbook. In the results of teachers' responses to the suitability of achievement standards for inquiry activities presented in textbooks and the suitability of the student's level, 5th graders showed lower average scores than 6th graders, and showed similar average scores in student interest and instructional difficulty. Also, it was confirmed that improvement was required for a total of 17 inquiry activities. Specifically, teachers responded that they had difficulty in guiding inquiry activities when the experimental results did not appear as intended in the textbook, when students' interest in inquiry activities was low, and when students and teachers had low understanding of related science concepts. Teachers pointed out practical problems such as difficulties in long-term observation in astronomy-related units, and students in upper elementary school not actively participating in dynamic play activities.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.63 no.5
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• pp.376-386
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• 2019

The purpose of this study was to explore the learning progression of logical thinking in acid and base chemical reactions and to evaluate its validity. For this purpose, we collected 387 participants in 9 schools of elementary, middle and high schools nationwide. The questionnaire developed in this study was composed of nine items. The questionnaire presented the acid and base reactants and products, and the students pictured their thoughts on how these substances change, and answered the reasons of their thoughts. Situation contexts of the questionnaire were divided into two groups: one kind of solute dissolved in a solvent, and two kinds of solute dissolved in a solvent. In this study, six levels of learning progression were assumed by combining material conservation logic, combination logic, proportion logic, and particle number conservation logic. By analyzing the data, Infit and Outfit values of Person reliability, Item reliability, MNSQ and ZSTD were obtained from the Rasch model. As a result of the analysis of data, it was found that lower levels of learning progression prevailed up to the younger grade students till $8^{th}$ grade. The higher levels of learning progression(Level 2~Level 5) prevailed up to the older grade students. However, higher levels of learning progression dropped sharply in Grade 12. The 5 level of learning progression was very low in all grades, and $9^{th}$ grade had highest percentage of students belonging to the 5 level. Interpretation of these unusual results suggests a future research related to explanation differences of textbooks.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.187-201
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• 2017

The study in this paper, which is part of a bigger study investigating non-cognitive characteristics of Korean students at the 4-12 grade levels, aims to identify the influential characteristics that explain students' decision to give up on mathematics learning. We consider seven non-cognitive student characteristics: value, interest, attitudes, external motivation, internal motivation, learning conation and efficacy. Data were collected from 21,485 Korean students, and were analyzed with a logistic regression method using SPSS. The findings show that efficacy was the most significant indicator of students' decision to give up on mathematics learning in all three grade level bands: elementary (4th-6th), middle (7th-9th) and high (10th-12th). In particular, the causal model analysis shows that students who highly value mathematics tend to have stronger internal and external motivation, which bring about stronger interest and learning conation, which in turn lead to positive attitudes and strong efficacy regarding the learning of mathematics. It was further found that while external motivation was a significant indicator of upper grade level students' decision to give up on mathematics learning, it was only a moderate indicator for lower grade level students. The findings of this study provide useful information about which non-cognitive areas need to be focused on, in what grade levels, to help students stay on track and not fall behind in learning mathematics.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.89-101
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• 2001

The purpose of this study was to develop the elementary school science instructional material for nurturing students' creativity and to analyze the effects of this material on the changes of students' creativity. This material was composed of student's worksheet and a teacher's guidebook, in which are relevant to the elements of creativity and creative activities that can be applied to elementary science curriculum of 5th and 6th grades. Student's worksheets include various creative activities: imagination, guided imagery, experimental activity, mind mapping as wrap-up, and 'let's think' as an extended activity, game, puzzle, making a cartoon, to be, role playing, and so on. These materials were applied to 5th grade science class, 156 students. They were divided into two groups: the treatment group to which developed material was applied and the control group which was a traditional lecture-centered class. After this material had been applied for 3 months, students of both groups took a test of creativity. Interviews and observation were also carried out with three level groups (higher, medium and lower level) which were divided within the treatment group based on their creativity score. The results of this study were as follows: The treatment group showed higher score on creativity than that of control group(p<0.01). In the result of interviews and observation, the students of the higher and the medium level accomplished their tasks by themselves better than those on lower level.All of them took an interest in visual activity. In a wrapping-up step, the higher level students made mind map more systematically and the medium students improved as time goes on, but low level students feel constrained. In totally, they used various expression methods and were interested in making drawings and cartoons creatively.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.583-613
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• 2010

Mathematics anxiety is likely to be a drag on mathematics learning if that is left alone, and it is important to grasp the cause of mathematics anxiety and devise how to get rid of it. The purpose of this study was to examine the cause of mathematics anxiety among elementary school children, to develop a math-friendly activity program geared toward easing mathematics anxiety and to check the effect of the developed program on the alleviation of mathematics anxiety. The subjects in this study were 32 students in a fourth-grade class in I elementary school located in Dongdaemoon-gu, Seoul. A math-friendly activity program was designed to alleviate the mathematics anxiety of the five subfactors-test anxiety, time constraints, comprehension, learning motivation and parent attitude-on which the students scored higher than their pretest collective averages. The mathematics anxiety pretest data, the objectives and content system of the current 7th national mathematics curriculum and the mathematics textbooks for 4-A and 4-B were analyzed to develop the math-friendly activity program that consisted of psychological remedy (positive thinking training) and non-psychological remedy (mathematics activities). After the program was implemented, we analyze the pretest and posttest mathematics anxiety data to determine the effect of the program. As a result, the collective averages of every student on math anxiety and its subfactors were lower in the posttest than in the pretest.

• Communications of Mathematical Education
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.327-347
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• 2009

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of mathematical communication-centered teaching using peer feedbacks on students' mathematics achievement and mathematical dispositions toward mathematics, and then this study examined the characteristics of feedbacks used by students. To do this study, two sixth grade classes selected from an elementary school in Seoul participated in the current study; one class for a treatment group applying mathematical communication-centered teaching using peer feedback, and the other for a comparison group applying traditional teaching using teacher-centered communication. The results of this study showed the fact that a treatment group of mathematical communication-centered teaching applying peer feedback scored statistically higher than a comparison group applying teacher-centered communication with respect to both students' mathematical achievement and disposition. Especially, this communication-centered teaching program focused on peer feedback was more effective to middle or lower level students than higher level students. In addition, mathematical communication-centered teaching applying peer feedbacks helps students reflect their own thinking process about problem solving, and students experienced the improvement of their confidence about mathematics from opportunities to provide peers with feedbacks. Finally, the present study suggests the important role of communication in mathematics learning, particularly student-to-student feedbacks rather than teacher-to-students feedbacks. That is to say, students need to have many opportunities to represent their own mathematical thinking processes using mathematical language.

• Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.57-75
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• 2018

This study aimed to analyze the effects of child abuse and neglect on male·female high school students and the moderating roles of peer attachment and closeness to teachers in the process. By using the second to the seventh yearsʼ data of 4^th grade elementary school student panel participating in the Korean Children & Youth Panel Survey(KCYPS), the study calculated descriptive statistics and performed hierarchical regressions. The main results of this study were as follows. First, for male high school students, as each level of child abuse, peer attachment, and closeness to teachers was higher, the level of ego-resilience was higher. However, as the level of child neglect was higher, the level of ego-resilience was lower. For female high school students, as the level of child neglect was higher, the level of ego-resilience was lower, while each level of peer attachment and closeness to teachers was higher, the level of ego-resilience was higher. In addition, for only male high school students, peer attachment moderated the effect of child abuse on ego-resilience. On the other hands, for both male and female high school students, as the level of child abuse and neglect were higher, the level of self-esteem was lower, while each level of peer attachment and closeness to teachers was higher, the level of self-esteem was higher. Moreover, for only female high school students, peer attachment moderated the effects of child abuse and neglect on self-esteem.