• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.293-303
• /
• 1994

The purpose of this study was to find the effect of molecular movement model based instruction on high school students' conceptions of diffusion and osmosis. The study was composed of two groups, the traditional instruction group in which the so-called traditional instruction was performed, and the other group in which interventions by researchers were made. The subjects of the traditional instruction group consisted of a total of 242 high school students from Seoul, Gwangju and Mokpo. The subjects of the model based instruction group consisted of 177 first-year high school students in Mokpo. The study was focused on the use of the term of 'molecular movement' in their explanation of diffusion and osmosis in the correct contexts. In general, students who got the molecular movement model based instruction showed more frequent use of the terms of 'molecular movement' in the correct contexts than the control group students did. It was found that misconceptions including teleological explanations changed into scientific explanations by the intervention. It seemed that the molecular movement model led students to make scientific explanations on natural phenomena. A further research is recommended to assess the improvement of teleological explanation and scientific attitude by the molecular movement model.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.667-679
• /
• 2000

One of the major activities in scientific inquiry, as well as in the process of conceptual change, is the generation of scientific hypothesis. In this study, the definition and the characteristics of scientific hypothesis are analyzed. Especially, differences between explanatory hypothesis and scientific explanation, predictive hypothesis and scientific prediction, and scientific hypothesis and the inductive generalization are analyzed. And the process of making scientific hypothesis is suggested as 4 stages, and the role and the characteristic of the abductive thinking, which can be viewed as one of the scientific inferences needed to generate hypothesis, are discussed. In analysis, concrete examples from integrated science textbook of high school are used for application to the classroom teaching.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
• /
• v.33 no.2
• /
• pp.242-257
• /
• 2014

Researchers have employed a diversity of definitions and measurement methods for creativity. As a result, creativity research is underrepresented in the literature and the findings of different studies often prove difficult to draw into a coherent body of understanding. With regard to assessment, there are some important problems both in creativity research and practice, such as originality bias and Big-C creativity bias in teachers' perceptions about creativity and creative thinking, and additive rather than multiplicative scoring systems of creativity assessment. Drawing upon most widely accepted conceptions of the creativity construct, I defined 'student's scientific creativity' as the ability to make a product both original and useful to the student in terms of little-c creativity, and 'scientist's scientific creativity' as the ability to come up with a product both original and useful to the science community in terms of Big-C creativity. In this study, an 'Assessment Formula for Scientific Creativity' was developed, which is consisted of the multiplication of originality and usefulness scores rather than the sum of the two scores, and then, with scores calculated from the assessment formula, the scientific explanations generated by children were categorized into four types: routine, useful, original, and creative types. The assessment formula was revealed to be both valid and reliable. The implications of the assessment formula for scientific creativity are examined. The new assessment formula may contribute to the comprehensive understanding of scientific creativity to guide future research and the appropriate interpretation of previous studies.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.327-345
• /
• 2013

This study aims to investigate how pre-service elementary school teachers understand 'something scientific', 'being scientific', 'scientific events' and 'scientific questions' through semantic network analysis. To achieve this purpose, this study carried out a central analysis of the frequency and density of words and the degree of connection between key words, a concentric analysis, a click analysis and a common network analysis through text semantic network analysis by using NetMiner 4.0 Program. Based on the results of these analyses, this study came to the following conclusions. Firstly, in perceiving 'something scientific', pre-service elementary school teachers recognized 'verification', 'objective' and 'experiment' as most important words. In other words, they perceived that main grounds for something scientific should be provided through clear facts, possible to be verified and accompanied by an exact and logical theoretical system. In regard to 'being scientific', they perceived 'explanation', 'objective' and 'verification' as most important words, while having a traditional point of view that science is a set that can be explained objectively. Secondly, in regard that the term, 'observation', is contained in 'scientific events', they showed a high rate of understanding it as a scientific event. In regard to scientifical reasons, they showed the highest frequency of 'observation', and for unscientific reasons, they showed the highest frequency of 'behavior'. In perceiving 'scientific questions', they showed the highest frequency of determining bacteria-related questions as scientific. As a reason why they thought as scientific, they mentioned 'observation' most frequently like 'scientific events', while mentioning 'value judgement' as a reason why they thought as unscientific most frequently. From the results of integrated network analysis, this study found out that words pre-service teachers commonly used in stating scientific events or scientific questions were overlapped with words they mentioned for scientific events or scientific questions. As a result, it was found there were many pre-service teachers having interpreted scientific words without clearly distinguishing scientific events or scientific questions.

• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.113-123
• /
• 2004

The concern with scientific mode1s has been growing in science education, and schematic models are frequently used to teach science concepts in secondary schools. The aim of this study is to investigate how well the scientifically gifted students understand scientific concepts through activities of modifying scientific models which we developed. Thirty 8th-grade students participated in the study, 15 in a control group and 15 in an experimental group. For the students in the experimental group, teaching material with activities of modifying models, while for the students in the control group, the teaching material with traditional activities such as explanation, problem solving, and reading. The teaching contents in physics for both groups were linear momentum. We used multiple-choice test and essay-type test to evaluate students' achievements after lessons, and then compared their achievements of both groups. Through the research, we could find a clue that model-modifying activities are helpful for the gifted students to enhance their understanding of physics concepts, although the statistics does not show meaningful difference between experimental and control groups.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
• /
• v.4 no.3
• /
• pp.205-217
• /
• 2011

This study analyzed the reading materials presented in the existing 'Experiment Observation' targeting 31 elementary school students and conducted a preliminary investigation to examine the cause which makes the science reading materials of elementary school difficult to read. Also, on the basis of a preliminary investigation, this study developed the reading materials on science. After that, by examining the degree of understanding about existing reading materials on 'Experiment Observation' targeting 55 students of elementary schools and the newly developed reading materials targeting 44 students of elementary schools, the study proved its effect. As the result of the study, the causes for which students felt difficulty in reading were as follows: the scientific or non-scientific terms were explained by using more higher levels of Chinese characters compared to the levels of students; the scientific terms never treated in the classroom were used in the reading materials without any explanation; the overall structure of existing reading materials was distracted and listed the fragments of information, and the sentences were described complicatedly; the contents of a text and the photo materials were not connected functionally. In addition, the newly developed science reading materials were preferred by students because more various methods were devised, such as more systematic structure, arrangements of simpler sentence structure, additional explanation of scientific terms, divisions of paragraphs and postscript and their understanding was found to be improved.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.25 no.5
• /
• pp.595-602
• /
• 2005

The purpose of this study was to test effects of the Triple Abduction Model (TAM) for improving the skills of scientific hypothesis generation in science learning. Twenty-six students were selected for the TAM group and 27 others were selected for a traditional group from one high school. Researchers developed and administered 10 TAM and traditional-style activities. The degree of hypothesis explanation was evaluated during the experimental treatment. Each Subjects' ability in scientific hypothesis generation was assessed by the Science Knowledge Generation Test A and B. Test A was used as a protest and B for a posttest. The results of this study revealed that the degree of hypothesis explanation of TAM was significantly higher than the degree of the traditional group, and the mean of the TAM group was equal to the mean of traditional group on the pretest. Additionally, the mean of the TAM group was significantly higher than the mean of the control group on the posttest. Therefore, instruction with TAM was more effective than the instruction using traditionals method for increasing students' hypothesis generation skills.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.40 no.1
• /
• pp.77-87
• /
• 2020

Scientific inquiry has emphasized its importance in various aspects of science learning and has been performed according to various methods and purposes. Among the various aspects of science learning, it is emphasized to develop core competencies with science, such as scientific thinking. Therefore, it is necessary to support students to be able to formulate scientific reasoning properly. This study attempts to explore problem-finding and scientific reasoning in the process of performing scientific inquiry. This study also aims to reveal what factors influence this complex process. For this purpose, this study analyzed the inquiry process and results performed by two groups of college students who conducted the inquiry related to osmosis. To analyze, research plans, presentations, and group interviews were used. As a result, it was found that participants used various scientific reasoning, such as deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, in the process of problem finding for their inquiry about osmosis. In the process of inquiry and reasoning complexly, anomalous data, which appear regularly, and the characteristics of experimental instruments influenced their reasoning. Various reasons were produced for the purpose of constructing the best explanation about the phenomena observed by participants themselves. Finally, based on the results of this study, several implications for the development context of programs using scientific inquiry are discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.27 no.1
• /
• pp.37-49
• /
• 2007

The purpose of this study was to classify the logical forms of scientific explanations provided by teachers in secondary earth science classrooms, to examine the characteristics of the scientific explanations in different forms, and to identify the roles of the teacher and students in discursive practices for scientific explanations. Data came from the earth science teachers who participated in overseas teacher in-service programs in the years 2003 and 2004. A total of 18 video-taped lessons and their verbatim transcriptions were analyzed. The result showed that deductive-nomological explanations occurred most frequently in earth science classrooms and that the deductive-nomological model was well-suited to those problems for which there existed firmly established scientific laws or principles to construct scientific explanations. However, abductive explanations were presented when the classes dealt with retrodictive tasks of earth science. The statistical-probabilistic and statistical-relevance models were also employed in explaining weather proverbs and unusual changes of weather, respectively. Most of the scientific explanations were completed through the teachers' monologic utterances, and students assumed passive roles in discursive practices for developing scientific explanations. Implications for science lessons and science education research were discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.525-540
• /
• 1997

The present study tested the hypothesis that maturation of the prefrontal lobes is a crucial factor determining the performance of scientific reasoning tasks, Functions of the prefrontal lobes, such as activating relevant information, sequential planning and monitoring, and inhibiting irrelevant information, are related thinking patterns with scientific reasoning. Therefore, we inferred the idea that the prefrontal lobes play an important role in scientific reasoning. To test the hypothesis. the present study investigated a prefrontal lobe patient's task solving procedures in scientific reasoning tasks and the correlation and regression analysis between a test of prefrontal lobe function and two scientific reasoning tasks, The perseverative errors in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test(WCST) was used as a measure of the prefrontal lobe function, The Melinark Type Task and the Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning were used as measures of scientific reasoning abilities. Ages and Group Embedded Figure Test were also used as measures of two alternative hypotheses, general maturation and field independency respectively. The prefrontal lobe patient showed a crucial deficiency in solving scientific reasoning tasks. In the tasks, the patient could not used the reasoning of If... and... then... therefore pattern. In correlation study, the perseveration errors of the WCST showed a significantly negative correlation with two scientific reasoning tasks. Multiple regression study also showed that the perseveration errors measured as a function of the prefrontal lobes have more contribution to scientific reasoning ability than contributions of alternative hypotheses. Therefore, the present study supported the hypothesis that prefrontal lobes play a crucial role in scientific reasoning ability, What function of the prefrontal lobes do play crucial role in scientific reasoning? The present study provided an explanation for the question, which inhibiting ability of the prefrontal lobes is responsible for the scientific reasoning ability, in a part at least. That is, perseverative tendency in task-solving procedures causes a deficiency of an ability to inhibit the wrong information to solve a task. The present study provided a possibility of neuropsychological approach in science education research. The present study also showed an importance of the prefrontal lobe development in the performance of scientific reasoning task.