• Journal of Science Education
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.318-333
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• 2017

In this study, we analyzed activities in life science chapters of middle school 'science' textbooks for the 2009 revised Korea national curriculum and examined the difference between the analysis based on scientific practices and the analysis based on inquiry skills. As a results, there was a lot of inquiry skills in the order of 'reasoning', 'observing', 'classification' in the all of grade. In scientific practices, 'data analysis and interpretation' and 'constructing explanations and devising problem solving' were biased. This shows that life science inquiry activities in middle school 'science' textbooks are lacking in diversity in scientific practice elements as well as inquiry skills, and that the goals of the activities are limited. In addition, through the interrelationships between scientific inquiry skills and scientific practice elements, we examined contents relevance in the transition from inquiry function center to scientific practice, and compared with the results of inquiry activities in textbook, The results of this study were matched monotonously due to the tendency to basic inquiry-data interpretation / basic inquiry-explanation. This comes from results of the lack of diversity in activities presented in middle school 'science' textbooks. In this study, it is suggested that efforts should be made to include diverse scientific practice elements in the process of realizing 2015 revised Korea national curriculum from the simple and diversity-less inquiry activity through analyzing the textbooks of the 2009 revised Korea national curriculum.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.35-48
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to analyze inquiry activities in the middle school science textbooks focused on the unit 'Nutrition of Plants' of the 2007 revision curriculum and the corresponding unit 'The Structure and Function of Plants' of the 7th curriculum in terms of content, process and contexts of inquiries. The average number of the inquiry activities in the unit 'Nutrition of Plants' was 9.2, which was a 3.8 decrease than in the unit 'Structure and Function of Plants'. In the respective of process of the inquiry activities, 'observation' was most prevailing in the basic inquiry process and 'data interpretation' was most prevailing in the integrated inquiry process in both of the units. In the respective of the types and contexts of the inquiry activities, 'experiment/observation' was most prevailing and the percentage of the natural scientific contexts was larger in both of the units. In the unit 'Nutrition of Plants', the components of the integrated inquiry process and the percentage of personal contexts were larger than in the unit 'Structure and Function of Plants'. And simulation activities were newly presented and technical contexts and natural environmental contexts were included in the unit 'Nutrition of Plants'. This study makes a suggestion that a wider variety of inquiry activities should be included when new science textbooks are developed.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.1245-1255
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• 2004

The purpose of this study is to develop a valid and reliable evaluating instrument for elementary school fifth and sixth graders. The instrument is developed through R&D procedure, which includes two checks of science specialist and two field trials of the instrument. Evaluating items are content-free for each science inquiry skill. Each science inquiry element is based on SAPA and the 7th curriculum. This study has selected 10 science inquiry skills(observing, classifying, measuring, predicting, inferring, recognizing of a problem, controlling variables, interpreting data, drawing a conclusion, designing an experiment), formulated a clear definition of the elements of science inquiry skills, and established the objectives of evaluation. The content areas are divided into three categories, material and energy, life and environment, and the earth and circulation. Each category contains 10 items. So the instrument consists of 30 items. The content validity of items, objectivity of the scoring keys, and clarity of the items has been checked twice by specialists in science education. At the same time, two field trials were performed to produce the reliability of the instruments, discrimination index, and item difficulty index. The instrument has the content validity is 91.6%, reliability 0.79, objectivity 93.3%, discrimination index 0.30, and item difficulty index 66.1%.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.626-639
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• 2008

To present the suggestions for improvement in science textbooks of high school, scientific inquiry activities in geology of earth science textbooks of Korea and the U.S. were assessed in the areas of the contents, processes and contexts. Regarding the contents of inquiry activities, Korean textbooks contain more number of inquiry activities (5.8 per section) than the U.S. curriculums (4 per section). Inquiry activities of Korean textbooks mostly fall on the interpretation of diagrams and graphs whereas those of the U.S. textbooks more hands-on experiment, data transformation and self designing. As for the number of inquiry process skills per inquiry activity, Korean curriculums contain an average of 1.8 whereas the American ones 3. It suggests that the U.S. textbooks require more integrated process skills than the Korean earth science curriculums. In the process skills of all textbooks studied, the highest frequent elements were inferring and data interpretation; the percentage of these two elements was an average of 73.3% in Korean textbooks and 46.2% in the U.S. This suggests that the Korean textbooks emphasize the process skill on particular area, and uneven distribution of elements of process skills may hinder the development of integration ability of students. particularly in the integrated process skills, the U.S. textbooks presented all 7 elements, while Korean ones presented only 2 to 4 elements, indicating that the Korean textbooks may have weak points in providing various inquiry activities for students compared to the American textbooks. In inquiry context analysis, Korean curriculums provide simplistic inquiry contexts and low applicability to real life whereas the U.S. curriculums provide more integrated inquiry contexts and high applicability to real life.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.387-394
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• 2005

We have analyzed the science-gifted educational program (year 2002) at the Seoul National University in terms of its educational objectives, scientific models, and cognitive processes in scientific inquiry in order to provide insights into developing and improving science-gifted educational program. We assumed the following items as important factors for teaching scientifically gifted students: higher-order thinking skills involving synthesis domain in the educational objectives, highly abstract nature and complexity in the scientific models, cognitive processes of planning experiments in the cognitive processes in scientific inquiry. According to the analyzed results, the program has the following characteristics: (1) the rates of both higher and lower-order thinking skill domain in the educational objectives are similarly high, but the rate of synthesis domain is relatively low; (2) in the case of the scientific models, the rate of the multiple concepts and/or processes model is relatively low, while the level of the abstractness is relatively on average (3) cognitive processes of authentic scientific inquiry is not thoroughly reflected in the scientific inquiry activities, and very few cognitive processes of planning experiments factor is reflected. Therefore, we conclude in the synthesis domain in the educational objectives, multiple concepts and/or processes model, and cognitive processes of planning experiments should be especially reflected more on the science-gifted educational program in order to serve the needs of scientifically gifted students.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.162-176
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• 2001

This study was covered with the analysis of five kinds of the middle school science text books(chemistry part) based on the oth curriculum. Particularly, inquiry activities part was analyzed by the three dimension framework which consists of inquiry content dimension, inquiry process dimension and inquiry context dimension and the results are as follows;1. In the analysis of the contents in the middle school science textbooks(chemistry part), the average number of total pages was 197.6. The illustration and picture were contained 0.66 in number per a page, and the average number of further readings was 5.8.2. In the analysis of the inquiry content dimension of inquiry activities, the total number of themes in five kinds of textbooks was 222. And the number of imquiry activities in five kinds of textbooks was siverse : A textbook had 51, B texbook 49, C textbook 37 and E textbook 35.3. For the analysis of inquiry process dimension. it follows in the order of 'interpreing data and formulating generalizations (42.4%)','observation and measuring (38.1%)','seeing a problem and seeking ways to solve it (7.8%)' and 'building, testing and revising the theoretical model(11.7%)'.4. As for the analysis of the inquiry context dimension, the scientific context occupied 94.2%, the individual context 0.4%, the social context 2.7% and the technical context 2.7%. It shows that the proportion of STS(Science-Technology-Society) related contents in inquiry activities was only 5.8%.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.586-601
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• 2008

The purpose of this study was to identify the scientists' abductive reasoning in three stages of hypothetical-deductive inquiry process; generating hypothesis, designing, and interpreting data and to suggest new analytic coding frames on abductive reasoning in each of the stages. For this purpose, the interview protocols collected through in-depth interviews with eight scientists were analyzed by the early frame with sub-elements derived from the literature reviews. The need of a new frame of analysis beyond the previously established elements arose from the result of this analysis because the processes of abductive reasoning were found in all three stages. Based on scientists' interview data, this study then designed a new frame of analytic coding frames on the abductive reasoning in each of the stages. The content validity index from four experts was 0.90, and these frames showed a good fit to analyze the scientists' real process of abduction in three stages of hypothetical-deductive inquiry process.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.48-60
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to analyze the patterns and characteristics of changes in integrated process skills during the process of science high school students' inquiry by using group-based trajectory modeling. 59 students participated in this study. Three hypothetico-deductive inquiry tasks were used as an intervention activity. We asked science high school students to perform those three tasks sequentially and to generate reports of the process and results. We evaluated students' reports by four elements (designing inquiry, collecting data, analyzing data, and forming conclusion) of the integrated process skills according to the scoring rubric developed by Lee and Park (2017), and analyzed the level of changes in integrated process skills in those three inquiry tasks by using group-based trajectory modeling. In addition, we analyzed the characteristics of changes in integrated process skills from several perspectives. The findings are as follows: First, concerning the change patterns of students' integrated process skills, all of the four elements were classified into two groups, but the change patterns were very different by elements. Second, regarding the change characteristics of students' integrated process skills, we found the context-dependency of integrated process skills, variation of learning progression for integrated process skills, and jaggedness of integrated process skills level. Based on these findings, we suggested that a couple of ways be sought to improve the integrated process skills of science high school students.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.92-111
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• 2020

The 2015 revised science curriculum and NGSS (Next Generation Science Standard) suggest computational thinking as an inquiry skill or competency. Particularly, concern in computational thinking has increased since the Ministry of Education has required software education since 2014. However, there is still insufficient discussion on how to integrate computational thinking in science education. Therefore, this study aims to prepare a way to integrate computational thinking elements into scientific inquiry by analyzing the related literature. In order to achieve this goal, we summarized various definitions of the elements of computational thinking and analyzed general problem solving process and scientific inquiry process to develop and suggest the model. We also considered integrated problem solving cases from the computer science field and summarized the elements of the Computational Thinking-Scientific Inquiry (CT-SI) model. We asked scientists to explain their research process based on the elements. Based on these explanations from the scientists, we developed 'Problem-finding' CT-SI model and 'Problem solving' CT-SI model. These two models were reviewed by scientists. 'Problem-finding' model is relevant for selecting information and analyzing problems in the theoretical research. 'Problem solving' is suitable for engineering problem solving process using a general research process and engineering design. In addition, two teachers evaluated whether these models could be used in the secondary school curriculum. The models we developed in this study linked with the scientific inquiry and this will help enhance the practices of 'collecting, analyzing and interpreting data,' 'use of mathematical thinking and computer' suggested in the 2015 revised curriculum.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.986-997
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• 2011

In this study, we developed analogical experimental activities to foster scientific creativity in inquiry learning and applied them to 7th grade science-gifted students. The influences of inquiry learning-based analogical experiments were investigated with respect to the experimental design processes. We classified the patterns of experimental design processes by creative thinking processes and analyzed performance levels by the elements of experimental design processes. The students' experimental design processes were categorized into three kinds of patterns such as reinitiated motion, backward-divergent motion and stationary motion. Those belonging to the reinitiated motion performed precise experimental design from new perspectives by identifying the mapping in depth and considering the elements of experimental design processes. In the case of the backward-divergent motion, they shifted their positions to new directions, but the concreteness of experimental design was insufficient due to the lack of mapping or considering the elements. In the type of stationary motion, maintaining their previous positions, they showed less performance of experimental design without considering the elements sufficiently. Educational implication of these findings are discussed.