• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.56-65
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to investigate how elementary school student understands or students understand the illustrations on the phase change of the Moon in science textbook and to find out how textbook illustration helps students form the conception of the phase change of the Moon. To identify this purpose, we selected illustrations on the phase change of the Moon in the science textbook revised in 2007 and 2009 revised science textbook. For this study we selected and interviewed 20 students in the fifth grade. We integrated all data collected through interviews and created a transcription and a protocol and then, confirmed scientific conceptions related to the phase change of the Moon in students' illustration reading. The result are as followings: First, students read more scientific conceptions related to the phase change of the Moon in illustration of the 2009 revised science textbook which is presented with the universal observer's view point and the earth observer's view point. Second, students who find meaning in the various elements of the illustration and interpret with the integration of the various elements, get a lot of relevant information from illustration. All students have no differences recognizing the elements presented in illustration. But there are differences of contents of illustration reading depending on how students interpret the illustrations with integration of the various elements and if students cannot figure out the four scientific concepts needed to understand the phase change of the Moon, they ignore the information provided by illustration or analysis in their own way according to information provided by illustration. So misconception appears in this process.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.133-142
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• 1994

Many students have misconceptions that upward direction force act on the object which is moving upward after being thrown vertically upward, and no force act on the object at the top of its flight because the object stop or don't' move at the top. To change these misconceptions, in this study, deductive reasoning tasks were used, and student's responses to the tasks were analyzed. In the first part of this study, student's prior conceptions about force and motion and student's deductive reasoning abilities were investigated. And the second part, student's explanations were classified to either the premise-based or idea-based explanation. In the case of the object which is moving upward, 62% of students who had misconception changed their misconceptions to physically correct concept, but, only 24% of students changed their misconceptions for the object at the top. For the first task, more students changed their misconceptions when they made responses based on premises than based on their own idea(p<.05), so, the first task can be helpful for conceptual change. 40% students changed their own misconception by reasoning deductively based on premises provided in the first task, but only 17% students changed by the second task. Student's reasoning abilities investigated in the first part of this study did not affect the conceptual change. Four students for the first task and one student for the second task did not change their misconception even though they made premise-based explanation and had high reasoning abilities.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.55-62
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to examine the pre-service elementary teachers' views on the necessity of science learning. The eighty five student teachers in their second year of studies were participated in this study. The participants freely wrote their thoughts on a question'Why should students learn science?' The results of the study are as follows: (1) The participants' responses were very diverse, so their responses contained almost all kind of values or arguments about the science learning suggested by researchers, and there was no difference in their response ratio between views of focusing on intrinsic values and views of focusing on extrinsic values; (2) About 30% of the participants had the biased conceptions on the necessity of science learning and they would be likely to explain their biased conceptions to their future students. The educational implications and the suggestions for further studies are also presented in this paper.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.944-956
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to investigate students' conceptions of the simple electric circuit using a battery and a bulb. 19 fourth grade students from a rural elementary school in Korea participated in this study. Data on the children's understandings of electric circuit were collected through three sources; prediction tests, drawing tests and individual interviews. The prediction tests were paper and pencil tests composed of 10 problems, predicting whether bulbs in 10 simple circuit diagrams would light. For each prediction, the children were asked to provide a written explanation of their thinking. The drawing tests consisted of 6 problems. One was to draw the inside of the bulb base, and the others were to make the wire connections between a battery and a bulb in the diagrams, to light the bulb. The interviews were conducted with seven children who showed differing degrees of understanding. No student was aware of the wire connections inside the bulb base. Many students stated whether the bulb would light or not, according to the tip of the bulb contacting the positive battery terminal and an end of wire contacting the negative battery terminal. Most of them thought that the tip of the bulb should contact the positive battery terminal, so that the bulb would light. In short, students did not use a scientific conception of electric current to predict and explain the electric circuit.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.15-28
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• 2003

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between the concept of heat and that of temperature for elementary students. Eight multiple choice type questions with explanation of reasons for selection were developed based on previous researches and the analysis of science curriculum for elementary students. The students of 9, 10, 11 years(n=292) were selected from two elementary schools in Taegu City. The responses of students' multiple choice and their explanations were analysed in each items χ² test used for the relationships between types of heat and temperature conceptions Half of elementary student could discriminate the two terms of heat and temperature, majority of them thought that heat is likely to be hot and temperature is the quantity of heat, which is not based on scientific conception. Elementary students thinkings about heat could be classified with material type of heat and molecular kinematics type. Material type of heat were more popular than with molecular kinematics type, although the latter is increased. Majority of students answered correctly in qualitative questions of mixing of hot and cold water, but about only one third of them answers in quantitative questions. Subtraction of cold temperature from hot temperature was the most popular explanation, even though one-quarter of students summed up the two temperature in quantitative situation of mixing hot and cold waters. Those who thought heat as the molecular kinetic responded more correctly in most difficult questions than those who as the material. Therefore, we concluded that the types of heat conceptions affected the concept formation of temperature.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.745-756
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• 2001

This paper is about interactional characteristics of a middle school student's conceptual ecology in the context of conceptual change. A case study in this paper shows that: (1) there is interacted with three characteristics(conceptions, past experience, and explanatory coherence) within conceptual ecology; (2) the interactional characteristics of conceptual ecology have significant affects on the difficulties of conceptual change. Implications of this case study are that: (1) teaching for conceptual change should start at the certain site related to subject-matter task within students' conceptual ecology; (2) Students' inconsistent explanations could be used as the clue of conceptual change; (3) Past experience is the important area of conceptual ecology research for understanding learners.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.475-491
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• 2006

In physics education, the research on students' conceptions has developed in the discussion on the nature and the difficulty of conceptual change. Recently, mental models have been a theoretical background in concrete arguments on "how students' conceptions are constructed or created." Mental models that integrate information in the presented problem and individual knowledge in their long-term memory have important information about not only expressed ideas but also in the thinking process behind the expressed ideas. The purpose of this study is to investigate the forming process and the characteristics of high school student's mental models about circular motion, and how they were changed by instruction. We used the think-aloud method based on the instrument for identifying student's mental models about circular motion, pretest of physics concept, mind map and interview for investigating student's characteristics. The results of the study showed that instructions based on the mental model theory facilitated scientific expressed model, but several factors that affected forming mental models like epistemological belief didn't change scientifically after 3 lessons.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.61-72
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• 2008

The purpose of the study is to research students' proficiency with systems-thinking approach concerning water cycles and to acquire data on Earth System-related concepts based on students' feedback. To achieve the purpose of the study, I chose 4 mid-level high school juniors living in Pohang, where the high school equalization policy has not been implemented, and the students answered a questionnaire about water cycles. Then, based on the results, I created a causal map and evaluated it using systems-thinking analysis. The results of the study are as follows: First of all, among the answers of the subjects, there were 21 concepts related to the conception of the earth system : 14 of the conceptions were linked scientifically, and 7 of the conceptions were not linked scientifically. Secondly, results of the causal map of what the subjects described showed that only two students'(A and C) feedback loops were completed, and that student C's feedback loop included unscientific reasoning. In conclusion, this study indicated that the students failed to understand the water cycle with the systems-thinking approach, or alternatively they applied low-level systems-thinking approach and had a lower understanding of it.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.456-465
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• 2002

The purpose of this study was to investigate the educational effects of an animation materials developed with the macroscopic particle moving sight. The 11 animations developed by the researchers showed the movements of molecules, ions, and electrons. The materials were developed for teachers to use when they taught "electrochemical cell' unit. The subjects were 151 students of 9th grade who were divided into the experimental and control group and were taught during 16 hours. In order to figure out the characteristics of each student before the instructions, a short-version GALT(Group Assessment of Logical Thinking) and the pretest of conceptions were carried out. After the instructions, students tested 3 types of exam; the posttest of conceptions, attitude test connected with science, cognition test. After 4 months later, students tested the posttest of conceptions agin for long-term memory effect. It was found that the exper-imental group using the developed animation materials had significantly higher scores of conceptual understanding than control group. The experimental group had also significantly higher scores of the long-term memory test and attitude test than control group. The results mean that animation materials which shows the macroscopic particle movement help stu-dents to understand scientific concepts and to elevate interests.

• Journal of the Korean School Mathematics Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.719-745
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• 2012

This research is a study on student's understanding fundamental conception of mathematical curriculum, especially in geometry domain. The goal of researching is to analyze student's wrong conception about that domain and get the mathematical teaching method. We developed various questions of descriptive assessment. Then we set up the term, procedure of research for the understanding student's knowledge of geometry. And we figured out the student's understanding extent through analysing questions of descriptive assessment in geometry. In this research, we concluded that most of students are having difficulty with defining the fundamental conception of mathematics, especially in geometry. Almost all the students defined the fundamental conceptions of mathematics obscurely and sometimes even missed indispensable properties. Prior to this study, we couldn't identify this problem. Here are some suggestions. First, take time to reflect on your previous mathematics method. And then compile some well-selected questions of descriptive assessment that tell us more about student's understanding in geometry.