• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.117-127
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• 1999

The present study investigated Korean and the US college students' scientific reasoning skills involving hypothesis-testing skills and tested the hypothesis that hypothesis-testing skills are more advanced ones than other scientific reasoning skills investigated in this study. Seven hundred and seventy-four(774) Korean and five hundred and sixty-eight(568) the US students were sampled in university level. The Test of Scientific Reasoning was used as a scientific reasoning test. The test is consisted of two conservational reasoning, two proportional reasoning, one pendulum, two probability reasoning, two controlling variable, one correlational reasoning, and two hypothesis-testing reasoning tasks. Korean students showed a significant higher score in proportional and probability reasoning tasks than the US students. However, the Korean showed a significant lower score in conservation and correlation reasoning tasks than their American counterparts. Further, Korean and the US college students showed a notably poor performance in hypothesis-testing skills comparing with other scientific reasoning skills, which supported the hypothesis that hypothesis-testing skills are more advanced ones than other scientific reasoning skills. In addition, the Korean showed a severe deficiency in candle-burning task which required the skill that students have to design a scientific test-procedure to test theoretical hypotheses. This study also discussed on the educational implications of the results of the present study.