• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.246-257
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• 2015

The purpose of this study was to develop and apply three types SMART instructional modules about the mineral resources and investigate its effect. One hundred students in the experimental group and 111 students in the control group from 6 classes in the $1^{st}$ year of a girl's high school participated in this study. One unit of tablet PC was provided to every two students in the experimental group and three types of SMART classes were implemented in class. Teacher-centered traditional classes were carried out for the control group. The instrument designed to assess the level of students' interest in mineral resources consisted of 10 items using 5-point Likert scale. To investigate the level of students' understanding, 15 items were developed on the mineral, mineral deposits, and the development of mineral resources. In addition, the participants were asked to describe advantages and disadvantages of the classes using the SMART modules. Results are as follows. First, participants in the experimental group showed a significantly higher level of interest on the mineral and the mineral learning than those in the control group. However, there was no significant difference between the two groups in terms of the desire to observe minerals and rocks. Second, students in the experimental group showed a higher level of understanding than the control group. The students with higher learning ability showed a significantly higher level of understanding than the lower group students. Third, the participants pointed out that the advantage of the SMART instructional modules was their experience in searching the relevant information and producing diverse outputs about mineral resource. On the contrary, the difficulties in coordinating opinions and decision making due to the excessive quantity of information were perceived as the disadvantage.