• Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.39-57
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• 2017

Objective: This study aims to investigate the effects of science activities related to seasonal customs on young children's scientific inquiry abilities and communicative competences. Methods: Participants consisted of twenty-six 5-year-old children who were going to day care center in Gwangju metropolitan city. Half of them belonged to the experimental group and the other half to the comparative group. The experimental group participated in science activities related to seasonal customs, and the comparative group participated in science activities according to the Nuri curriculum. Results: The results of this study showed that scientific inquiry abilities and communicative competences of the young children in the experimental group were meaningfully improved. That is to say, the scores of the five sub factors of scientific inquiry abilities and the two sub factors of communicative competences of the experimental group were meaningfully higher than those of the comparative group. Conclusion/Implications: It is significant that this study provides basic information for future science activities related to seasonal customs that will be conducted in the early childhood field.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.318-333
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• 2017

In this study, we analyzed activities in life science chapters of middle school 'science' textbooks for the 2009 revised Korea national curriculum and examined the difference between the analysis based on scientific practices and the analysis based on inquiry skills. As a results, there was a lot of inquiry skills in the order of 'reasoning', 'observing', 'classification' in the all of grade. In scientific practices, 'data analysis and interpretation' and 'constructing explanations and devising problem solving' were biased. This shows that life science inquiry activities in middle school 'science' textbooks are lacking in diversity in scientific practice elements as well as inquiry skills, and that the goals of the activities are limited. In addition, through the interrelationships between scientific inquiry skills and scientific practice elements, we examined contents relevance in the transition from inquiry function center to scientific practice, and compared with the results of inquiry activities in textbook, The results of this study were matched monotonously due to the tendency to basic inquiry-data interpretation / basic inquiry-explanation. This comes from results of the lack of diversity in activities presented in middle school 'science' textbooks. In this study, it is suggested that efforts should be made to include diverse scientific practice elements in the process of realizing 2015 revised Korea national curriculum from the simple and diversity-less inquiry activity through analyzing the textbooks of the 2009 revised Korea national curriculum.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.414-426
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• 2010

For this study, inquiry-based learning program was developed for promoting elementary students' scientific justification activities based on their uses of scientific evidences. The program was applied to the 5th grade science class to examine the types of evidences and major features of scientific justification activities. Analysis of the data showed that the evidences used by students were classified into knowledge-based evidence, experience-based evidence and authority-based evidence. As for students' justification features, this study reports three major cases: a case evolving evidence and justification to become more valid and logical, as inquiry activities progressed, other case maintaining less valid and illogical evidence and justification, and final case revealing passive and reluctant participation in the inquiry activities. Overall, students' participation in scientific justification process became more valid and relevant, while there were some students who were unable to make the relevant relations between evidences and claims they made. The educational implications were discussed to consider more effective ways to improve the scientific classroom environment through social knowledge construction.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.132-143
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• 2013

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of inquiry activities proposed in high school physics textbooks that were developed based on the 2009 science curriculum in Korea. The inquiry activities were analyzed using the notion of scientific practices introduced in the Science Education Framework (NRC, 2012). The results showed that the inquiry activities in the textbooks emphasized two of eight types of scientific practices including "Analyzing and interpreting data" and "Constructing explanations". In contrast, the activities required students to "ask questions" only once in a total of 291 science inquiry activities. The other types of scientific practices appeared less than 10%. Also found was that the types of scientific practices were not relevant to the way inquiry activities were used for textbook content. Implications for the curriculum and science teacher education were discussed.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.24-31
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• 2007

Research into scientific inquiry methods indicates that providing various types of inquiry methods can enhance students' science loaming in terms of providing students with actual science in various ways' more so than exposure to one type of inquiry method. This article develops a framework for an analysis of scientific inquiry types based on the nature of scientific enterprise. We selected three types of scientific inquiry: these were minds-on activities, hands-on activities, and experimenting. Elementary science textbooks in the 7th national science curriculum were analysed according to the following subject areas; earth science, physics, biology, and chemistry. A total of 61 teaching units from 3rd through 6th grade science textbooks were investigated. The frequencies of each type of scientific inquiry method were slightly different among four science subject areas. The most frequent type which appeared in physics and chemistry was the hands-on type, while the minds-on activity type was the most frequent type which appeared in earth science and biology.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.204-217
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• 2008

This study analyzed the inquiry activities appearing in the astronomy sections of elementary, middle and highschool level science textbooks according to the five essential features of inquiry in the classroom as proposed by the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2000), and SAPA (Science-A Process Approach). On the basis of this analysis, it is clear that the science textbook inquiry activities released the limitation to meet the goal of science education, namely scientific literacy, as it has been laid out by the 7th Science Educational Curriculum. This study revealed that the features of scientific inquiry which are most frequently used in the astronomy sections of science textbooks are 'data collection' and 'form explanation', whereas the features of 'oriented-question', 'evaluate explanations' and 'communicate and justify' rarely appeared. The analysis of inquiry activities by SAPA showed that the basic inquiry skills of 'observing', 'communicating' and 'manipulating materials' were used with increasing frequency according to grade level, and the integrated skills of 'investigating', 'creating models', 'interpreting data' and 'experimenting' were more emphasized in the textbooks. Therefore, it is suggested that students be provided with more opportunities to experience all the features of scientific inquiry and scientific processes as envisioned by the 7th Science Educational Curriculum in order to achieve the stated goal of scientific literacy. Science educators should be required to develop new lesson modules which will allow students to experience authentic scientific inquiry. It is crucial for science teachers to reflect upon and develop their understanding and teaching strategies regarding scientific inquiry through professional development programs in teacher education.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.271-280
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• 2006

In this paper, an Online Scientific Inquiry Learning System was developed with the aim of improving student's scientific literacy and scientific inquiry ability. It was determined that there should be 4 distinct principles applicable to the design of the Learning system. First, it should enrich learner's motivation. Second, it should provide students with the chance for reflecting on the inquiry process. Third, it should emphasize multi-dimensional forms of interaction. Fourth, students should be able to create new information through it. The server system including the database, equation editor, reporting tool, search engine were all utilized for developing the learning system. In addition, the authors produced 24 web-based projects which were guided inquiry activities in which various inquiry abilities (reasoning, prediction, experiment design) could be developed. An Online Scientific Inquiry Learning System is not the only program which could be utilized in improving scientific inquiry abilities, but at the very least, such a system can serve as the prototype for developing an online learning system.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.25 no.spc5
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• pp.465-475
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to develop a spider inquiry program for elementary school students based on the scientific-knowledge generating model. For the purposes of this study, we selected three species of snider (e.g. Pardosa astrigera, Argiope bruennichii, Nephila clavata) which were easily found in a school garden by elementary school students. The spider inquiry program was based on a model of the process of scientific-knowledge generation, and consisted of two sections: for students and teachers. The students' program was designed to generate scientific-knowledge, whilst the teachers' program was designed to guide the inquiry smoothly even in the case of teachers who lack experience in inquiry activities or possess limited subject knowledge on spiders. As a result, this program was found to have an influence on generating the scientific-knowledge of elementary students and the results further suggest that it may be helpful to teachers conducting an inquiry activity. Additionally, this program could be used as a selective activity lesson such as a science inquiry lesson, or as a biology inquiry class, as a weekend life experience study or as an activity on a science camp.

• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.24-43
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• 1990

This study investigated the effectiveness of teachers inquiry-discovery verbal interaction which was compared with expository-directive verbal interaction. Two teachers from two different kindergarten groups were trained and observed during conversation and science corner activities. Sixty children were observed during science corner activities and tested with a scientific achievement instrument. Teacher's inquiry-discovery verbal interaction had a more positive effect on children's scientific attitudes than teacher's expository-directive verbal interaction. Teacher's inquiry-discovery verbal interaction had a more positive effect on children's scientific achievement than teacher's expository-directive verbal interaction. Children's scientific attitudes and children's scientific achievement had a positive correlation.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.1216-1234
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• 2004

School science practical work is often criticized as lacking key elements of authentic science, such as peer argumentation or debate through which social consensus is obtained. The purpose of this paper is to review the recent studies about the argumentation and to explore the conditions and the model of argumentative scientific inquiry, which is specially designed open inquiry in order to facilitate students' peer argumentation. For this purpose, a theoretical discussion for the argumentative scientific inquiry as the way of authentic inquiry in schools was developed. The conditions for argumentative scientific inquiry were found to be the following: multiple arguments, students' own claims, opportunities for oral and written argumentation, equal status of debaters, and community of cooperative competition. For these conditions, the argumentative scientific inquiry was organized into experiment activities and argumentation activities. During argumentation activity, students should be guided to advance written argumentation through writing a group report for peer review and oral argumentation through a critical discussion. Through the argumentation between groups and in group, the students' arguments would be elaborated repeatedly. The feedback from argumentation links experiment activities to argumentation activities. Hence, the whole process of this inquiry model is circular.