• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.117-122
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• 2002

From the beginning of the 20th century, calculus is gradually offered to high school students in many countries. However, in Chinese high school, the instruction on calculus is nearly an untouched field. Many people don't believe that high school students can study calculus well. They think calculus knowledge in students' brains is likely to become the “half-cooked food”, and this can produce a bad effect on the study of formal calculus at university. The authors consider that the emphasis of calculus in high school should be the intuitive understanding of fundamental calculus concepts, and it is also the basis of the understanding of formal concepts. Traditional mathematics course with chalk can't meet the needs of calculus teaching. The use of technologies can enhance the calculus teaching, especially the informal and visual calculus teaching, help students understand the underlying concepts. The authors describe how the use of technologies can improve the calculus teaching and learning, and point out that the use of technologies can clear up people's doubts.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.60 no.6
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• pp.428-435
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• 2016

Effective mastering and learning of basic organic chemical concepts is pivotal to ensure students continue to excel to the higher levels of organic chemistry learning. Concept learning is crucial for first-year organic chemistry students so that they can comprehend and understand a concept better and able to make connection to problems. In the present paper, the authors have implemented the Interactive Anonymous Quiz (IAQ) with "must-have" features in the organic chemistry course as a teaching tool to instill students' interest and enhance conceptual understanding in organic chemistry. The effectiveness of this activity was examined and evaluated through students' reflective writing. Students showed positive learning outcome on the implemented activity as reflected by the reflective writings. In addition, this activity could be employed as an activity to check on students' concept understanding, to instill students' interest in organic chemistry course and to improve on students' weakest topic in organic chemistry in the future classes.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.100-112
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• 2021

Based on the importance of visual representation for scientific understanding, this study applied visual thinking in elementary science classes. This study analyzed elementary students' visual thinking and investigated the instructional influences. Students' perceptions on the class applying visual thinking were also investigated. The subject were 38 fourth grade students, 18 in experimental group and 20 in control group. For the unit of 'Shadow and mirror', on-line and off-line blended classes were applied in both group because of COVID-19. The experimental group student were asked to construct their own visual thinking, while the control group students used traditional workbook. The results were as follows. First, students' visual thinking can be classified into three different types, which are 'activity recall type', 'result summary type', and 'core concept representation type' based on what they represent rather than how they represent. Second, applying visual thinking in science class showed significant effects on science academic achievement, science related attitude, and creative academic efficacy. Third, students' perceptions on applying visual thinking in science classes were very positive. Students perceived visual thinking activities were interesting and helpful for understanding science. Educational implications of applying visual thinking in elementary science classes were discussed.

• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.157-173
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• 2024

Researchers continue to emphasize the centrality of proof in the context of school mathematics and the importance of proof to student learning of mathematics is well articulated in nationwide curricula. However, researchers reported that students' performance in proving tasks is not promising and students are not likely to see the need to prove a proposition even if they learned mathematical proof previously. Research attributes this issue to students' tendencies to accept an empirical argument as proof for a mathematical proposition, thus not being able to recognize the limitation of an empirical argument as proof for a mathematical proposition. In Korea, there is little research that investigated high school students' views about the need for proof in mathematics and their understanding of the limitation of an empirical argument as proof for a mathematical generalization. Sixty-two 11^th graders were invited to participate in an online survey and the responses were recorded in writing and on either a four- or five-point Likert scale. The students were asked to express their agreement with the need of proof in school mathematics and to evaluate a set of mathematical arguments as to whether the given arguments were proofs. Results indicate that a slight majority of students were able to identify a proof amongst the given arguments with the vast majority of students acknowledging the need for proof in mathematics.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.287-294
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• 2015

As employment changes quickly in structure, enterprises put more and more stress on basic vocational competency skills. This study aimed to grasp the basic vocational competency skills of S College Department of Radiological Technology students and present the basic data. The gathered data was analyzed using T-Test and Oneway ANOVA. The analysis showed that the students mostly had average or higher levels in the seven areas of basic vocational competency skills. Reading and writing skills among communication skills were the lowest, followed by the skills of understanding global culture and using foreign languages among organization understanding skills, and then by numeracy skills. On the contrary, interpersonal relationship skills were the highest in level. This indicates that the students will establish good interpersonal relationships with hospital patients and members. There were also statistically significant differences in reading and writing skills among communication skills, numeracy skills, and the skills of understanding global culture and using foreign languages among organization understanding skills. This study measured the basic vocational competency skills of S College Department of Radiological Technology students, which might somewhat restrict the application of its results to the students of all universities. The results show that students should be instructed to improve the skills of communication, numeracy, organization understanding, self-management skills, etc. Therefore, it seems necessary using various programs customized to school years and student levels and performing education properly connected to industrial establishments to foster the workforce with excellent basic vocational competency skills.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.93-104
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to investigate the high school students' interests and and perceptions about the soil concepts. The data were obtained from 72 boys and 82 girls at a high school in Daegu area. The questionnaires were developed 8 questions for students' interest and 10 questions for students' understanding. The results of this study were as follows. In the examination of students' interest on the soil concepts, boys showed 3.2point(64.9%) out of 5point and girls showed 3.2point(64.6%) out of 5 point. Furthermore, a percentage of correct answers for understanding on the soil concepts was 47.4%. In detail, Boys had 48.2% and girls had 46.6%, boys showed higher understanding about soil concepts than girls. And students understood soil concepts by a visible side, to approach the soil concepts from a biological point of view, rather than a geologic one. Also high school students didn't think soil concepts to consist of minerals and rocks from a geologic point of view. Correlation between interest and understanding on the soil concepts was very weak by showing r=.170(p<.05).

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.467-490
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• 2013

Correlation is a basic statistical concept which is necessary for understanding the relationship between two variables when they change values. In the middle school curriculum of Korea, only informal definition of correlation is taught with two-way data representations such as scatter plots and contingency tables. In this study, we investigated Korean high school students' understanding of correlation using a test consisting of 35 items about interpretation of scatter plot, contingency table, and text in realistic situation. 216 students from a high school in Seoul took the test for 20 minutes. From the results, we could observe the following: First, students did not have right criteria for determining the strength of correlation presented in scatter plots. Most of students could determine if there is correlation/no correlation and if the correlation is positive/negative by seeing the data presented in scatter plots. However, they did not judge by the closeness to the regression line but rather judged by the closeness between data points. Second, when statements about comparing the strength of correlation in the context of real life situation were given in text, the students had difficulty in understanding the distribution-related characteristic of the bi-variate data. Students had difficulty in figuring out the local distribution characteristic of data, which cannot be guessed merely based on the expression 'The correlation is strong' without statistical knowledge of correlation. Third, a large number of students could not judge the association between two variabels using conditional proportions when qualitative data are given in 2-by-2 tables. They made judgement by the absolute cell count and when the marginal sum of two categories are different for explanatory variable they thought the association could not be determined. From these results, we concluded that educational measures are required in order to remove such misconceptions and to improve understanding of correlation. Considering that the current mathematics curriculum does not cover the concept of correlation, we need to improve the curriculum as well.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.172-180
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• 2014

The first purpose of this study is to distinguish difficult chapters in 'Speed of objects' chapter and find the factors which give difficulty to the teachers and students. Also, it attempts to compare the students' assessment scores with the degree of difficulty in teaching and also with the degree of difficulty in learning. This report is expected to help science teachers develop their PCK(Pedagogical Content Knowledge) for teaching the chapter professionally. 15 teachers who had taught the 'Speed of Objects' chapter and their 386 students took part in the survey to acquire information about the difficulties in teaching and learning. 386 students also received a test to examine their understandings of the chapter. The results of this study are as follow; First, the degree of teachers' and students' difficulty is only affected by the contents, and the degree of onerousness felt by teachers is higher than that of students. Second, The topics caused higher difficulty to teachers were 'Understanding the meaning of motion(2nd lesson)', 'Understanding the meaning and unit of speed(5th lesson)', 'Changing unit of speed(6th lesson)', 'Drawing a distance-time graph(7th lesson)', and 'Understanding the relative motion(10th). The topics that led higher difficulty to students were the contents of 5th, 6th, and 7th lessons. Third, the 'Speed of Objects' chapter can be divided into 4 types of difficulty according to the degree of teaching and learning; 'Strong difficulty', 'Learning difficulty', 'Weak difficulty', and 'Teaching difficulty'. Last, students showed low achievement to the tasks that were related with 'Strong difficulty' and 'Teaching difficulty'.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.507-514
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• 2013

In this study, the characteristics of visually impaired elementary students' conceptions on dissolution were investigated. The semi-structured interviews about phenomenon of dissolution, uniformity of solution, conservation of mass on dissolving and volume change during dissolving were conducted with 4 fifth-grade elementary students with visual impairments (three were blind, and one had low-vision). Interviews were recorded and the data were analyzed after transcription. As a result, students with visual impairments knew well about the phenomenon of dissolution, uniformity of solution, and conservation of mass on dissolving, while they couldn't explain volume change during dissolving. Although students with visual impairments were found to have similar level of understanding with students without visual impairments, they had sounder understanding about uniformity of solution. However, students with visual impairments had superficial understanding based on phenomenal experiences. Some of students with visual impairments tried to give micro-level explanation. Based on these results, educational implications were discussed.

• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.405-435
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• 2019

Despite the recent emphasis on value research in mathematics education along with the significance of values from a new perspective, there has been a lack of research on the values perceived by teachers and students in Korea. This paper analyzes how fifth-grade students would perceive the values of a master teacher with expertise in elementary mathematics education after her teaching of mathematics and whether their values on mathematics learning would change. According to the study, the students recognized that the master teacher valued understanding, preview-review, picture, problem, and reason in mathematics learning. Among these, the value of understanding was perceived as the core value. An analysis of the students' values on general mathematics learning and personal mathematics learning showed that preview and review were the most important before and after the master teachers' teaching. An analysis of the changes in the values of students showed the greatest change in the value of understanding. Instead of accepting the values of the master teacher as it were, students actively reconstructed and maintained them. Based on these results, this paper has drawn implications regarding the consideration of students' values in mathematics learning.