One of the problem of science education in terms of its status as a unique discipline is the tendency of qualitative, rather than quantitative, arguments and judgements on research activities. In this study, a model called "Diamond Model" and an index formula for the balance of researches are suggested for achieving more pictoricaI and quantitative understandings on the distribution of researches in science education. Diamond Model is consisted of two dimensions corresponding to two main long-debated issues in science education, i.e. the dimension of cognitive-affective and the dimension of concept-process. In Diamond Model the geometrical symmetry represents the the balance of researches. An index formula for the balance was developed in order to ensure that the value of the index is between 0 to 1 and the numerical values of the index corresponds to the geometrical symmetry of the diamond. Then, in order to check their utility, the model and the index formula were applied to analyze the research papers appeared in JKARSE for the last 10 years.

The purpose of this study is to investigate elementary school 6th grade children's preconception on body's digestion, circulation, breathing and excretion. By means of questionnaire, teacher is presented with misconception which students may have. On the basis of this way, firstly they draw up and put in free-concepts were investigated from objective test and sought after misconeption which student had and inquired whether the result of response made difference by sex and areas or not The result of study is as follows: 1. In the course of investigating and analyzing mis-preconecptios, teacher had misconceptions partially, as like students. 2. Many a student have misconceptions: nourishment in made for itself in body. 3. In circulation range most of students know that heart is making blood, and they don't make conception that blood is nourishment which was eaten from food. 4. They know the breath is only physiological function: they breathe to live. All air-breathing is necessary. 5. They are not relevant blood in course of urine and sweat formation they have non-scientific conceptions which water eaten is so. They know that all of sweat and urine and ordure is excretion. To sum up, many student have misconceptions as for digestion and circulation and breath and excretion of body especially. Circulation and excretion is more so. if inspection in a field of sex, they will know male had less misconceptions than female. in a field of region, student from rural are as had more misconceptions than the one from urban areas.

The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of systematic analogy on pupils' concepts changes compared with non-systematic analogy and no analogy using longuitudal study. The subjects were the second year middle school students(N=140), 49 of them were experimental group, using systematic analogy; 47 of them were control group 1, using non-systematic analogy; and 44 of them were control group 2, using no analogy. We have elicited their ideas about electric current three times: pretest, posttest and delayed posttest by P-O-E(Prediction-Observation-Explanation) method. With time, resistant ;rrelevant idea was decreasing dominantly; sequential reasoning idea and scientific idea were increasing; and current consumption idea was rare. Systematic analogy is more effective than non-systematic analogy on pupils' concepts changes of electric current. Systematic analogy is more effective than no analogy in case of simple situation, but we couldn't find significant difference between systematic analogy and no analogy in case of complicated situation.

The purposes of the 'Students' Science Inquiry Experiment Tournament' which is one of the 'Students' Science Inquiry Olympic Tournaments' are; 1) cultivate students' intellectual interests, inquiry abilities, and scientific attitude dealing with students' scientific reasoning abilities, problem solving abilities, and experimental apparatuses operation abilities. 2) contribute substantiality of science education through experimental inquiry learning. 3) make the ground of basic science development of the future society by selecting excellent students who have talents for science. 4) elevate science teachers' morale by this tournament. The test items set and evaluation results of the tournament were analysed in this study. The results of this study were ; 1) the discrimination ability of the paper-and pencils test and the experiments were low because the students' scores of the items were not normally distributed and standard deviations were very small values. 2) most of the tournament participation students did not answered to the subjective type test items. 3) according to the responses of the tournament participation students, the tournament contribute to the students' interests in science. But the opinion was dominant that the tournament didn't contribute to school science education improvement.

The purpose of this study was development of 'Environmental Science' of high school appropriate to Sixth Natinal Education Curriculum. In view that ultimate aim of environmental education is forming responsible environmental behaviors and the goals of values and behaviors are as important as knowledges and skills, A new environmental text of high school level was developed and it was based on analysis of seven texts and environmental education in Fifth Korean Curriculum. This text have seven units, 1.Habitates : What're the Meanings?, 2.Nuclear Energy: Can't be Avoid?, 3.Acid Rain : What're the Messages", 4.Ethanol : Is this Future Fuel?, 5.Wastes : A New War!, 6.What're the National and Global Environmental Issues? and 7.Our Water: Can Drink, Really? This text was stressed equally in goals of four environmental education and avoided from the array of knowledges. Therefore included various teaching strategies and independent actions of students. 'Open-ended value learning' and 'free behavior learning' in text were special learning parts for aquisition of values and formation of behaviors. To verify the effects of new developed environmental text, the direct learning was carried out by 286 students in total. Post test scores of experimental groups per each units were significantly higher than those of control groups about four goals, respectively. The Results of questionnaires by 50 teachers from five different schools were as follows. For validity of selecting contents for units, 74% of respondents replied positively. For classification and presentation of four goal-groups, 90% replied positively in validity and 82%, in utility. For validity of various teaching strategies, 88% and for the degree of including student-centered independent actions, 86% replied positively. For importances and expected effects of 'open-ended value learning' and 'free behavior learning', showed positive responses respectively, 88%, 92%. Therefore this text is effective to acheive four goals of environmental education equally.

This study has been performed in order to achieve three objectives. They are as follows: To analyze, based on the research literatures, the nature of scientific inquiry ability and the characteristics of its constitutive elements. To identify inquiry skills and techniques essential to such areas as physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science. To develop instructional models and materials for enhancing inquiry ability on the part of high school students. It was found in the study that the scientific inquiry was interpreted in terms of different meanings according to the viewpoint of the person who are interested in the nature of science. The scientific inquiry has been viewed as the process of knowledge formation, scientific method, inquiry process or process skills depending on the epistemological, methodological, educational perspectives, respectively. It was also identified that certain kind of skills or techniques would be used for inquiry in only one specific area of the science. The skills and techniques are effectively learned when those are taught with specific knowledge in each area of the science. The model and materials for fostering scientific inquiry skills will be presented on the second part of the report.

This is very important to know teachers' and children's scientific knowledge, scientific inquiry skills and cognitive abilities for better education of children. The subjects of this study are about 60-150 in each group. There are instruments used ; To test scientific knowledge a test is developed by the author. To test scientific inquiry skills, the test developed by Eun Kyung Yong is used. To test cognitive abilities, GALT, short version is used. There are results; Firstly, inservice teachers' scientific knowledge is better than preservice teachers', which is better than children'. Secondly, inservice teachers' scientific inquiry skills nearly equal preservice teachers', which are better than children'. Thirdly, preservice teachers' cognitive abilities nearly equal inservice teachers', which are better than children'. Fourthly, teachers' (special area-science) cognitive abilities are better than teachers' (special area-vidual art, music, physical education). Elementary teachers in Korea have fundamental abilities to teach elementary children.

The purpose of this study was to investigate Korean secondary school students' perceptions of science and technology related social problems and STS education to ascertain the extent to which the current science programs incorporate STS themes. Students indicated that STS related problems or STS issues were given little attention in their science classes, even though they believed that studying those problems would be important. Results of the study support the contention of need for more attention to the implementation of STS themes into current Korean science education.

This study aims to identify the differences in chemical problem solving process of college students when the amount of information, problem context and the reasoning level were varied. Four students were participated and each student solved the problem by think-aloud method and then interviewed individually. Problem solving stage, ratio of time for each solving stage, solving strategy, misconceptions, and errors were identified and discussed related to the characteristics of problems. And, the relationships of students' belief system about chemistry & chemistry problem solving and problem solving characteristics were also identified.

Since the late of 1960,s, the improvement of science inquiry skills has been one of the most important goals in secondary science education. To achieve this goal, it is essential to develop a valid and reliable instrument for evaluating science inquiry skills. The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable instrument for evaluating science inquiry skills for high school students. The instrument is developed through R & D procedure, which includes two field trials of the instrument. This study has formed a clear definition of the elements of science inquiry skills (formulating a hypothesis, controlling variables, designing an experiment, numeric calculation, graphing experimental data, inference, determining relationship, determining causalities, predicting experimental results , drawing a conclusion, formulating a generalization or model), and established the goals of assessment and developed the items of assessment. The instrument, Test of Earth Science Inquiry Skills, consists of 33 items which measure 11 science inquiry skills. There are content-free items for each science inquiry skills. This study has selected 11 science inquiry skills which are considered appropriate for being evaluated by paper-and-pencil test with SIEI (Hur,1984). The content validity of items, objectivity of the scoring keys and clarity of the items were checked by six experienced specialists in science education. At the same time, the two field trials has been executed and produced the reliability of the instrument, item difficulty index, and the effectiveness of distracters. The first field trial was performed using a sample of 304 high school students, and the second one using a sample of 872 high school students. Because the content validity is 84 % and the reliability (K-R 20) is 0.84, the developed instrument in this study is considered valid and reliable. The difficulty index is 49.4 %, answer ratio 59.1 %, the discrimination index 0.47 and the effectiveness of distracters evenly distributed, which also suffice the criteria of good instrument. The developed instrument in this study can diagnosis the well-developed science inquiry skills and the ill-developed science inquiry skills of the students, and trace the degree of the improvement of science inquiry skills.

Teachers' conception about the nature of science is considered to be an important factor to improve the students' conceptions of that. It is assumed that teachers' conception of the nature of science may be influenced by their views of learning. The first purpose of this study was to investigate the exploratory relationships between teachers' conceptions about the nature of science and their views of learning. The second one was to compare the their conceptions and views of learning before and after science education lectures during 1 semester. We administered the questionnaires for the nature of science and for constructivist's learning, respectively, consisted of 5 dimensions (relativism-positivism; inductivism- deductivism; decontextualism-contextualism; content-process; instrumentalism-realism) and of 6 aspects (student; learning; instruction; teacher; curriculum; evaluations) were administered to 57 pre-service elementary teachers (female=44; male=13) before and after lectures. In pre-test it was revealed that respondents had not the consistent conceptions about the nature of science. The conception of relativism was more dominant than those of positivism, deductivism than inductivism, decontextualism than contextualism, process than content and instrumentalism than realism. They had more constructivist views in the respect of process of learning than in other respects, that is, students, instruction, teacher, curriculum and evaluation. But no significant correlations between the dimensions of the nature of science and the aspects of the views of learning suggest that constructivst views of learning was not deeply related with their conceptions of the nature of science. In post-test we had similar results with those of the pre-test, but the process-content dimensions of the nature of science was correlated with the constuctivist views of learning. Therefore we concluded that elementary pre-service teachers had the constructivist views of learning which was isolated with their conceptions of the nature of science although they had science educations course. We need to develop the course to make the conceptions of the nature of science relate view of learning.

This study is to consider hypotheses with integral view on the respect of creative thinking. Subjects of this study are Korean students in the 5th grade who participated in the Field Trip Contest of the second Korean Youth Science Festival, an openended inquiry investigation. Objectives of this study are as follows: 1) to measure the inquiry level of the Field Trip Contest activity 2) to find how many hypotheses were made on different types in the inquiry investigation 3) to measure the quality level of hypotheses made in the scientific inquiry investigation 4) to find out the correlation between the 1st and 2nd hypotheses and the final activity score in the two staged scientific investigation In the consequence of it, inquiry level of the Field Trip Contest was very high with good activity topics and openended way of investigation. Hypotheses were made in the prediction, plan, and conclusion parts in the field trip activity report. They used hypothesis-as-prediction typed statements(3.41/team) more than hypothesis-as-explanation(1.28/team) and descriptive hypothesis(0.03/team) types. Content-related hypothesis(5.03/team) and process-related hypothesis(6.16/team) were usually coupled each other. Most of them had difficulties in hypothesis-from-evidence(0.31/team, 10/32 teams) in the comparison of hypothesis-from-simple conjecture(10.62/team). The quality level of content-related hypotheses(0.74point/statement) and process-related hypotheses(1.98point/statement) were very low by the hypothesis-quality scale(Quinn and George, 1975) for the content-related hypotheses and the process-related hypothesis quality scale developed in this study. There was considerable correlation between the activity score and the 1st and 2nd hypothesis in the 2 staged inquiry investigations with the 2nd and 3rd topics($0.41{\ast}$, $0.59{\ast}{\ast}$ repectively).

The purpose of this study was to identify how young children conceptualize living things and nonliving things. For this study, a total of 465 young children was sampled in Krea, and a questionnaire of paper test was administered to them. The results were as follows. 1. More than 80% of young children recognized dogs and dandelions as living things, but less than 60% of children recognized bird's eggs and chestnuts as living things. 2. Mostly, young children's ability to distinguish exactly between living things and nonliving things improved by increasing grade level. 3. Criteria to distinguish about living things and nonliving things are firstly to be mobilized and secondly to be breathed.