• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.346-356
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to explore the characteristics of elementary science gifted students' modification of scientific explanations based on evidences. For this study, sixteen $6^{th}$ elementary students were participated. The subjects of this study were enrolled in the program for the science gifted. Students were asked to generate initial hypotheses before experiment, and to modify and revise their scientific explanations based on the experiments about water rising in burning candle(s). All the processes of small group discussion during the inquiry were audio-recorded. Students' modification of their scientific explanations were appeared in three types: 1) appropriate connections among evidences, reasoning, and claims, 2) disconnections among evidences, reasoning, and claims and/or use of inappropriate reasoning, 3) scientific explanations without their own understanding. Other problems that students encountered in the processes of modification of their explanations were also discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.37-49
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• 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 earth science society
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.759-772
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to understand characteristics of eighth graders' conclusions presented in their self-directed scientific inquiry reports. We developed a framework, Analysis of Conclusions of Self-Directed Scientific Inquiry, to analyze students' conclusions. We then compared the conclusions with the inquiry questions students generated to find out whether the questions affected students' conclusions. In addition, we analyzed students' responses from the survey about their perceptions of drawing conclusions. According to the results, the conclusions were characterized into two categories, i.e., scientific basic assumption and scientific explanation. Almost half of the students' conclusions fall under the scientific basic assumptions. Most of the scientific explanations were deductive explanations and inductive explanations. Then, the kinds of conclusions were affected by the inquiry questions because the scientific explanations were made more than the scientific basic assumptions in answering the inquiry questions. Some students couldn't recognize differences between conclusions and experiment results.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.887-900
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• 2011

Teachers use explanations to communicate important scientific ideas to students. Consequently, all biology teachers should be evaluated to determine how effective they are at constructing and communicating biological explanations. Open response questions are required to detect pre-service biology teachers' abilities to communicate robust and accurate scientific explanations. Nevertheless, multiple-choice questions are typically preferred by educators because of the common drawbacks of using open-response instruments, such as scoring time, inter-rater scoring disagreements, and delayed feedback to test takers. This study aims to measure pre-service biology teachers' competence in building scientific explanations and to investigate how accurately multiple-choice questions predict the results of open-response questions. One hundred twenty four pre-service biology teachers participated in the study and were administered 20 multiple-choice items and three open-response items designed to measure the accuracy and quality of their explanations of evolutionary change. The results demonstrated that pre-service teachers displayed higher competence when tested with multiple choice items than when tested with open response items. Moreover, scores derived from multiple-choice items poorly predicted the scores derived from open-response items. Multiple-choice items were also found to be poor measures of the consistency, purity and abundance of conceptual elements in teachers' evolutionary explanations. Additionally, many teachers held mixed-models composed of both scientific and naive ideas, which were difficult to detect using multiple-choice formats. Overall, the study indicates that multiple-choice formats are poorly suited to measuring several aspects of biology teachers' knowledge of evolution, including their ability to generate scientific explanations. This study suggests that open-response items should be used in teacher education programs to assess pre-service teachers' explanatory competency prior to being permitted to teach science to children.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.497-512
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• 2023

While scientific explanation is a fundamental component of science, teachers often lack familiarity with the formal structure of scientific explanations and the criteria for assessing their quality. Consequently, this study aims to clarify the concept of scientific explanation and proposes a tool for constructing scientific explanations. The primary objective is to explore the tool's impact on enhancing the explanatory skills of pre-service teachers when it comes to the phenomenon of condensation. The research findings indicate that many pre-service teachers initially operated at a description level during the pre-test. However, the implementation of the tool enabled them to advance their explanatory skills beyond the associative level. Notably, the tool was analyzed for its ability to provide pre-service teachers with a conceptual framework for explaining phenomena and guiding logical explanations and micro-level interpretations. This study holds significance in demonstrating that pre-service teachers can comprehend the formalities and criteria of scientific explanations and apply them to enhance their own explanatory abilities. Moving forward, efforts should be made to enhance the scientific explanation level among pre-service teachers across various topics and subject areas. Furthermore, pre-service teachers need classroom experiences that foster the construction of scientific explanations in authentic contexts.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.161-177
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• 2009

This study aims to explore how teachers construct scientific explanation during instructional practices to help students' scientific inquiry. Before investigating teachers' classroom practices, elementary school science curriculum was examined to identify scientific concepts, particularly in earth science. Then, a total of six teachers' scientific explanation in actual teaching practices was analysed focusing on a) explanation of scientific concepts; b) rationale for scientific explanation; c) connection between scientific explanation and everyday explanation. The findings are as follows. First, the science curriculum provides $1{\sim}2$ main scientific concepts per unit, which are mostly appeared in the unit title. Those concepts and sub-concepts are not explicitly described but embedded in students' inquiry activities. Second, the teachers explain scientific concepts and discuss the rationale behind the scientific explanation, but rarely connect scientific explanation to everyday explanation. Also, the level of scientific explanations is low remaining level 1 or 2, not reaching 3, the highest level. Based on the results, the study suggests a) teachers need to provide explicit and clear explanations about scientific concepts; b) teachers are required to connect scientific explanation and everyday explanation; c) the level of teachers scientific explanation should be elevated by using an evidence, reasoning and claim, the components of scientific explanation as well as introducing new scientific concepts and inquiry activities.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.293-303
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• 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 Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.101-109
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• 2004

The purpose of this research is to provide useful data in forming sound scientific concepts by investigating elementary students' non-scientific concepts related to their concepts of biological adaptation, and by analyzing the general inclinations and causes of some misconceptions. Twenty-four objective questions were designed to be given to 5th and 6th grade elementary students in order to investigate their concepts of biological adaptation. According to the test results, they formed scientific concepts in most questions. But they appeared to have many misconceptions in some parts which should be guided by the teacher's additional explanations rather than by the education curricula's focus. There are some cases where the 6th grade students had more misconceptions than the 5th grade students who were not systemically taught the concepts of biological adaptation, for the reasons of strengthening or maintaining the misconceptions by confusing the contents of learning. Male and female students have different scientific concepts of different questions according to their interest and attention. Therefore, it is necessary to develop various teaching-learning data which can help the teachers' additional explanations about the concepts of biological adaptation and invoke students' interest and attention, and to seek appropriate measures to form sound scientific concepts among teachers as well as students.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.167-180
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• 2023

Teacher interventions in science classrooms are important because they can have a major impact on students' practices. This study qualitatively analyzed what kinds of utterances teachers used to intervene in students' practices of constructing scientific explanations. Two elementary school teachers, L and K, participated in the study, and their lessons in the sixth-grade science unit, 'Structure and Function of Plants' were reorganized for students to engage in the scientific practice of constructing explanations. In each lesson, the two teachers were asked to support students' practices as part of responsive teaching. The results of the study showed that the two teachers mainly utilized empathetic and disciplinary utterances, respectively, which were used to support emotional, processual, and conceptual aspects of students' scientific practices. The empathetic utterances were employed to support students' practices in the order of noticing, actively accepting, and offering alternatives. By contrast, the disciplinary utterances were used in the order of finding deficiencies, evaluating, and urging to improve students' practices. The reasons the teachers made use of empathetic and disciplinary utterances, respectively, were discussed, and implications for science education were suggested.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.149-160
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• 2007

This study was conducted to investigate the relationships between the patterns of elementary school teachers' explanations and the patterns of students' questions types on scientific phenomena. for the purposes of this study, we collected questions related to scientific phenomena from 255 $3rd{\sim}6th$ students in 2 elementary schools. Classifying the students' questions collected, 20 representative questions for each type were selected. Data regarding teachers' scientific explanation from 62 teachers of 3 elementary schools were also collected. The results of the analysis of the questions for each science field show that the students in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades have the most questions regarding biology, and those in the 6th grade have more questions regarding earth science. Regarding question types, object exploration questions and explican exploration questions formed the majority. Moreover, the higher the students' grades, a decrease in the number of conjectural questions and an increase in the number of causal questions were observed. As a result of the analysis of the teachers' explanation, the following explanation types could be discerned; conjecture, hypothesis, prediction, teleological explanation, information given to feed exploration questions, as well as verification and information supply fer verification purposes. There were 4 kinds of relationships between question types and explanation types. One was the explanation fitting to each question type, a second was the explanation with additional content than the question required, a third was where the explanation was inappropriate to the question, and a forth was where the teacher responded that they "don't know." This study, investigating the relationships between questioning as a scientific inquiry process and explanation, will help to promote discussion regarding science classes in elementary school.