• Hwankyungkyoyuk
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.75-86
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• 2000

The purpose of this study is to analyze the content of environmental inquiry activities and values of elementary school students written in their reports of the Energy Environment Inquiry Activity Contest which is a unit contest of the Youth Science Festival held annually in Korea and get some ideas for the valuable way of Korean environmental education. 10 teams' reports were gathered and the locality, class study area, inquiry theme, inquiry method and values were analyzed and introduced as case studies to get some insights to teach elementary school students environmental values through inquiry activities of science subject approach. Each teams set various inquiry themes in the content domain of energy resources and earth environment conservation focusing on each team's geographical characteristics and occurring environmental problems in their local areas. There were 16 sentences representing technocentrism and 12 sentences representing ecocentrism. 5 of 10 teams showed both of technocentrism and ecocentrism in their reports. But their was only scientific knowledge without any environmental values in one team's report. Inquiry activity is a good teaching-learning method to develop environmental literacy. There should be environmental values involved as far as it is the environmental inquiry activities using environmental subject matter. The result of this study proposes that environmental educators should actively intervene for inquirers to set a stage in the whole process to search for an alternative to solve environmental problems involved in their project activities. The reason is because the environmental education in the elementary school is established to operate by the infusion way into various subjects already existed in the Korean curriculum.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.53-65
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• 2022

In the application and composition of learning content, the field trip learning of scientific inquiry could provide a positive effect. Also, it can arouse an experience of various inquiry activities through open thinking. In addition, it could take a positive effect by providing the diversity and specificity of wildlife experience for the living organism. The biology inquiry program of the field trip is a necessary process to acquire ecological experiences in the learning context. However, there is some problem to solve before the performance of field trip learning as professional knowledge of the outdoors inquiry. Therefore, this study developed a field trip inquiry program for the plant in a coastal dune using artificial intelligence to assist professional knowledge. The researcher carried out literature reviews and analysis related to studies and programs to investigate learning steps, content, and strategy. Also, this study investigated the effects of the program on the affective domain of gifted elementary science students. According to the results of this study, the program can provide a positive effect on motivation, task commitment, and attitude level. Consequently, the field trip learning program for plant in the coastal dune using artificial intelligence developed in this study can arouse a positive effect on the affective domain. Therefore, additional study is necessary related to inquiry programs of the field trip for various students and sites.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.109-122
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• 2015

In National Curriculum of Science revised in 2007, free inquiry was newly introduced to increase student's interest in science and to foster creativity by having students make their own curiosity questions and find answers by themselves. The purpose of this study is to analyze elementary school students' perceptions on free science inquiry activities applying a brain-based evolutionary approach. For this study, 106 the fifth grade students participated, and then completed a questionnaire on free inquiry activities according to a brain-based evolutionary science teaching and learning principles. The students performed a series of steps of the Diversifying, Estimating-Evaluating-Executing, and Furthering activities in each of Affective, Behavioral, and Cognitive domains (ABC-DEF approach) and constructed their own free inquiry diary, then the observations by the researcher and interviews with the students were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The major results of the study were as follows: First, the majority of the students perceived the each domain and step positively although a few of them perceived negatively. The reasons perceived as negatively were categorized into two; preference dimension of like or dislike and ability dimension of metacognitive or self-reflective capacity. Also, they perceived the free inquiry experience in the form of ABC-DEF as helpful to understand the nature of scientists' scientific activities. Based on these findings, implications for supporting authentic inquiry in school science are discussed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.617-626
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• 1998

Inquiry approach in teaching science has been widespread in Korea since the Third National Curriculum in 1970's. But the effect of the approach has never been evaluated systematically in Korea, so the science educators do not know if the inquiry approach really works and if any critical problems inhibit the effect of the approach. In this context, the NAEP of the Unied States and the APU of the United Kingdom were model programs for assessing the effect of the inquiry approach in teaching science. The purpose of this study is to develop an assessment system for evaluating the effect of inquiry teaching in elementary and secandary schools. For this purpose, an assessment framework and 240 test items were developed and tried with a sample of 8,906 students. The results say that the developed tests are reliable. The average Cronbach $\alpha$ reliability coefficient of the tests was 0.69. The discrimination index(point-biserial correlation coefficient) ranged from 0.39 to 0.54 with a mean of 0.49, which indiate they are excellent in discriminating students in terms of their inquiry achievement. The test items were also analyzed by "item response theory." The results also say that the items are successfully developed.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.45-57
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to guide and apply gettable and accessible materials around everyday life into classroom instruction, and to find out their effects on student academic achievement. In order to achieve it, this study was tried to develop and guide available materials around life in teaming activities, to provide a preliminary assignment that could apply the available materials, and to compare its academic achievement to one from field trip loaming. For the hypothesis testing, first, the experimental and comparing classes were selected based on the results of basic learning diagnostic evaluation, which conducted by the researcher being served as a full-time science teacher of the third and sixth grade of K elementary school in Kwangju for 2 years. Secondly, the instructional use of the available materials around life was applied to the experimental class. Also, the instructional use of the existing materials was applied to the comparing class. Finally, for the testing of the effects on academic achievement, the posterio test was implemented after conducting the experimental instruction in knowledge·understanding, inquiry process, and attitude domains classified by the unit characteristics. Using SPSS/WIN program the t-test was performed in order to compare the differences between the two groups. Major findings were as follows: 1) In the achievement test of knowledge·understanding domain, there were no significant differences at the 5％ level between the experimental and comparing classes. It could be difficult to say, therefore, that the instructional use of the available materials around life was more effective than the instructional use of the existing materials. However, it had some effects on differences between the third grade final achievement test and sixth grade experimental class. 2) In the achievement test of inquiry process domain, there were some significant differences in that the sixth grade experimental class was higher than the third grade out-of classroom experience unit. It was indicated that the instructional use of the available materials around life had some effects on improving the students' inquiry ability 3) In achievement test of attitude domain, there were some significant differences. It was shown that the self-evaluation test of the sixth grade experimental class unit was higher than that of the third grade out-of classroom experience unit; Especially, the learning activities in the experimental class were more active, and the experimental practice ability was improved. It was presented that the instructional use of the available materials around life had some effects on the students' academic achievement in attitude domain. It was concluded from this study that the instructional use of the available materials around life was less effective on Knowledge understanding domain, but was effective on improving their scientific inquiry ability and interest on science education.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.149-160
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• 1998

The purpose of this study was to analyze the 6th national secondary science curriculum and classroom practices to collect the basic data for developing secondary science program focusing on creative problem-solving ability. The creative problem-solving ability was conceptualized as an active process of producing new solutions to problems and consisted of five components: general knowledge, domain-specific knowledge, motivation, divergent thinking and critical thinking. The research questions were generated as follows: (1) Whether creative problem-solving elements-domain specific knowledge(declarative knowledge and inquiry methods) were included or not in the 6th secondary science curriculum, textbooks and teacher's guide? If so, how are they represented? (2) Whether the teachers tried to enhance divergent and critical thinking of their students. Through content analyses, observations and interviews, these research questions were answered as follows: (1) Inquiry methods, which are important to develop creative problem-solving abilities in science, were underestimated in comparison with declarative knowledge. In other words. inquiry methods were regarded only as tools to understand the scientific concepts and principles. (2) It was hard to find the situations which teachers provided opportunities for divergent and critical thinking to their students. Based on these results, the followings were recommended: (1) Inquiry methods should be regarded as a goal not as a tool and be used to acquire inquiry methods themselves. (2) Teachers should not stick to the prescribed inquiry methods prescribed in the textbook, but to give opportunities for thinking various kinds of inquiry methods to improve divergent and critical thinking.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.66 no.2
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• pp.107-123
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of learning using computer-based science inquiry program. To this end, the three lessons computer-based science inquiry were developed in domain of material's properties. The developed program was put into K middle school located in Seoul and the effects were verified. For the experimental group, the three lessons computer-based science inquiry related to the separation of mixture were introduced, and for the comparison group, the contents presented in the textbook were introduced as a teacher-centered teaching method. To verify the effects of the program, 2-way ANCOVA was performed on positive experiences about science and science core competency, and 2-way ANOVA was performed on academic achievement. As a result of the study, there were significant differences between the two groups in positive experiernces about science and scientific core competencies and academic achievement (p<.05), and group^*gender interaction effect was only significant in academic achievement (p<.05). From the results of this study, we could see the possibility of using a computer-based science inquiry program as a chemistry teaching method that enables sustainable scientific inquiry.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.77-86
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• 2014

By PISA 2007, TIMSS 2011, Korean high school students had high academic achievement to science and mathematics, while they had low attitude. Prospective college students are increasingly avoiding natural science and engineering. Moreover, the opportunities to learn to computer science in middle and high school are disappeared rapidly. The necessity of STEAM program based on Physical computing arise under these situation. Therefore, we developed STEAM program and studied the effects of the program in 2012. The result showed that students' scientific interests and attitude, scientific problem solving ability, scientific creative problem solving ability, personality test for children, and satisfaction of school life were enhanced. This study is follow-up study for the same students who improved every domain of the measurements. They were administerd pre-test at start of 2012, post-test at end of 2012, and delayed post-test at the end of 2013, on same test. The result of the study showed that only attitude to Scientific Inquiry was enhanced, but there was no significant result on the other domain of the test in comparison with start of 2012. But this result demonstrate the effect of STEAM education conversely.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.66 no.1
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• pp.42-49
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• 2022

Many elementary school teachers' lack of scientific knowledge reveal as several problems in teaching science. Thus, elementary school teachers need to improve their scientific knowledge, but there is the limit to improve the teachers' scientific knowledge through activities based on lecture that conducted in process of training and retraining them. Therefore, Improvement for training science teacher to improve scientific knowledge of elementary school teachers would be searched in this study. Depth interview was conducted toward three elementary school teachers, who had conducted action research, to improve content knowledge of material domain within teaching process and elementary school science. Based on result of the interview, difficulty and development that the three teachers were commonly experienced in process of conducting scientific inquiry in action research were analyzed. One of the difficulties of the inquiry were to figure out how the three teachers, who participated in the interview, understand specific concept, what they do not understand, and what they should study more to understand the concept. And there was a circumstance that the teachers did not know how to apply procedural knowledge, which learned explicitly in the process of setting plan for conducting research, into real context. Since there was difference between knowledge that they understand disjunctively and context that observed in real circumstance, they faced difficulty. However, the teachers conducted analysis of topic, planning research, conducting research, discussion of the result by themselves with those difficulties Thus, the teachers mentioned that not only content knowledge had been improved, but understanding of procedural knowledge, which is not intended to improve, had been also improved. Besides, they also mentioned that comprehensive understanding content knowledge, which they already understood, was also helpful. And the teachers suggest that if there were chance to discuss and examine the scientific practices by consisting of group with colleagues rather than conducting it individually it would more efficient studying. Considering their suggestion, direction of training elementary school teachers for improving their scientific knowledge should be improved in a way to understand science concepts based on direct research about context that is generated in circumstance of studying group of the teachers. Consequently, it would contribute to improvement of teaching science by combining teachers' practice and understanding.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 2015

This study aims to find out the effect of pre-service elementary teachers' experiences of inquiry performance in the life on their images about a scientist and science teaching anxiety. Thus, this study selected 162 college juniors who completed 'Science Teaching Material Research & Teaching Methods' for one semester at a university of education. Groups of 3 to 4 pre-service teachers were made to select one of the 10 experimental topics and inquired it for themselves, and make a presentation about the results before the other pre-service teachers. The results of this study can be summarized as below. Firstly, as a result of investigating pre-service elementary teachers' opinions about the characteristics of scientists, it was found that they thought of scientists prudent, intellectually superior, creative, and hard-working, but did not consider them artistic or religious, no matter if they had inquiry performance experiences. Especially, to such characteristics as intellectually-superior, creative, open-minded, outgoing and responsible, they showed more positive responses after inquiry performances. Besides, in scientists' activity types shown in pre-service elementary teachers' drawing pictures of a scientist, 'Experimental Activity' increased most after their inquiry performances, and in the place of activity, 'Laboratory' was most since it was related to activity types. Secondly, as a result of examining per-service elementary teachers' science teaching anxiety before and after inquiry performances, it was found that they showed statistically significant differences in all the domains, scientific knowledge, inquiry class preparation and inquiry class management. This finding could be interpreted as their inquiry experiences had positive effect on their having confidence in teaching science.