A Comparison of the Effects of the Discovery-observational and the Expository-observational Teaching Methods on Learning Interest of Elementary School Students in the Life Cycle of Fruit fly

초파리의 한살이 단원에 대한 발견식 관찰 수업과 설명식 관찰 수업이 초등학생의 학습 흥미도에 미치는 영향

This paper aims to compare the effects of two teaching methods, the discovery-observational(DO) and the expository-observational(EO) instructions, on students learning interest in the life cycle of fruit fly. The subjects, 463 third-graders from two elementary schools in Changwon City, were divided into two groups, the DO group and the EO group. After the instruction on the life of the flies in two different teaching ways, a questionnaire with 13 items was devised regarding the students' interest, and the subjects were asked to respond to it. The results reveal that the general mean score of the DO group is higher than that of the EO group. Also, the DO group obtains the higher mean score in each item, except two items about knowledge learning. The differences of the mean scores of the two types, general as well as item-individual, between the two groups are statistically significant. This suggests that the class about the life cycle of living creatures easily getatable and observable, such as fruit flies, should be student-centered investigatory one, where students themselves collect them and observe the process of their growth and whole cycle.