A Comparative Analysis on Elementary Students방 Scientific Attitudes by Questionnaire and Ethnographic Study

질문지법과 문화기술적 방법에 의한 초등학생의 과학적 태도에 대한 비교 분석

For a profound understanding about the elementary students' scientific attitude, I have performed this study based on the students' opinion by the ethnographic interview and participant observation of science classes. I have analyzed the data by qualitative data analyzing method, and compared the analyzed results with analyzed results by the Likert's scaled as il questionnaire method. To perform this study, I selected one elementary school located in an agricultural village in Choong-Buk Province in Korea and studied four 5th grade students. Here, I present results of this study as follows. First, in ethnographic interview, all informants represented positive reaction to scientific curiosity. But, It is appeared that there are external curiosity and internal curiosity. Internal curiosity is more closely and positively related to problem solving skills. Second, all informants represented positive open-mindness expressing their own opinions actively and accepting other students' opinions. Students who had positive critical-mindness and voluntariness recorded high scores in science achievement. Third, scientific attitude analyzed by ethnographic methods didn't correspond with scientific attitude measured by Likert's scale in all cases. I presumed this discrepant result could come from subjects' different tendency on replying to questionnaire and students' own criterion.