• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.13-35
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• 2023

Ocean currents play the most important role in causing and controlling global climate change. The water depth of the Yellow Sea is very shallow compared to the East Sea, and the circulation and currents of seawater are quite complicated owing to the influence of various wind fields, ocean currents, and river discharge with low-salinity seawater. The Yellow Sea Warm Current (YSWC) is one of the most representative currents of the Yellow Sea in winter and is closely related to the weather of the southwest coast of the Korean Peninsula, so it needs to be treated as important in secondary-school textbooks. Based on the 2015 revised national educational curriculum, secondary-school science and earth science textbooks were analyzed for content related to the YSWC. In addition, a questionnaire survey of secondary-school science teachers was conducted to investigate their perceptions of the temporal variability of ocean currents. Most teachers appeared to have the incorrect knowledge that the YSWC moves north all year round to the west coast of the Korean Peninsula and is strong in the summer like a general warm current. The YSWC does not have strong seasonal variability in current strength, unlike the North Korean Cold Current (NKCC), but does not exist all year round and appears only in winter. These errors in teachers' subject knowledge had a background similar to why they had a misconception that the NKCC was strong in winter. Therefore, errors in textbook contents on the YSWC were analyzed and presented. In addition, to develop students' and teachers' data literacy, class materials on the YSWC that can be used in inquiry activities were developed. A graphical user interface (GUI) program that can visualize the sea surface temperature of the Yellow Sea was introduced, and a program displaying the spatial distribution of water temperature and salinity was developed using World Ocean Atlas (WOA) 2018 oceanic in-situ measurements of water temperature and salinity data and ocean numerical model reanalysis field data. This data visualization materials using oceanic data is expected to improve teachers' misunderstandings and serve as an opportunity to cultivate both students and teachers' ocean and data literacy.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.658-672
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• 2022

The unique teaching and learning difficulties of speed-related units in elementary school science are mainly due to the student's lack of mathematical thinking ability and procedural knowledge on speed measurement, and curriculums and textbooks must be constructed with these in mind. To identify the implications of composing a new science curriculum and relevant textbooks, this study reviewed the structure and contents of the speed-related units of three curriculums from the 2007 revised curriculum to the 2015 revised curriculum and the resulting textbooks and examined their relevance in light of the literature. Results showed that the current content carries the risk of making students calculate only the speed of an object through a mechanical algorithm by memorization rather than grasp the multifaceted relation between traveled distance, duration time, and speed. Findings also highlighted the need to reorganize the curriculum and textbooks to offer students the opportunity to learn the meaning of speed step-by-step by visualizing materials such as double number lines and dealing with simple numbers that are easy to calculate and understand intuitively. In addition, this paper discussed the urgency of improving inquiry performance such as process skills by observing and measuring an actual object's movement, displaying it as a graph, and interpreting it rather than conducting data interpretation through investigation. Lastly, although the current curriculum and textbooks emphasize the connection with daily life in their application aspects, they also deal with dynamics-related content somewhat differently from kinematics, which is the main learning content of the unit. Hence, it is necessary to reorganize the contents focusing on cases related to speed so that students can grasp the concept of speed and use it in their everyday lives. With regard to the new curriculum and textbooks, this study proposes that students be provided the opportunity to systematically and deeply study core topics rather than exclude content that is difficult to learn and challenging to teach so that students realize the value of science and enjoy learning it.