• Journal of Science Education
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.49-65
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• 2018

Astronomy is the subject that can easily draw students' interest in studying science, therefore plays an important role in developing scientific core competence. However, it is difficult to develop spatial thinking that is required in understanding astronomical concepts through the classroom lessons. Planetarium, along with the science museum, is one of the most representative informal educational institution where astronomical concepts can be taught beyond time and space constraints. In this study, we developed the astronomy education program that is operated in the planetarium and applied the program to the elementary, middle and high-school students to investigate the effects of the planetarium lesson compared to the classroom lesson. The duration of this research was about 8 months, and the number of the students involved is 761, including participants of the 1 night and 2 days camps in the Daegu National Science Museum. The newly developed planetarium lesson is comparable to the previous classroom lesson of which topics are cardinal points, constellation, and the rotation of the earth. Test items were developed to evaluate the understanding of the astronomical concepts. The study was conducted based on the pre- and post-test with non-equivalent groups design comparing classroom and planetarium lessons. The results of this study are as follows. First, planetarium lesson is more effective for understanding astronomical concepts such as the cardinal points, earth's rotation, and the constellation than classroom lesson. Second, planetarium has a positive effect irrespective of gender and previous knowledge. Third, planetarium for high school students has the same effect as additional observation activities followed by the classroom instruction. Therefore, planetarium can be used as an alternative, effective tool when night observation is not available. In summary, planetarium is an effective tool that helps students to understand the astronomical concepts.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.110-121
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• 2002

In this study, the verbal interactions occurred during the CASE(Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education) activities in the middle school science class has been analyzed regarding with students cognitive level. The subjects were 24 students of 6 groups in a middle school in Korea. Verbal interactions within group discussions during CASE activities were audio-taped, transcribed, and analyzed. Also, classroom observation and interview with students were carried out. The results showed that the student with higher cognitive level tended to be a group leader. They had strong influences on the group discussions in each step of problem solving. Also, the higher cognitive level students were more active in metacognitive discussion and more often used scientific terms. When their group met difficulties in each stage of problem solving, such as perception of problem and designing experiment, the higher cognitive level students suggested some ideas to help their peers and gave them an explanation of how they worked. Low cognitive level students had difficulties in perception and solving the problem as compared with high cognitive students. It was common during activities for the low cognitive level students to fail to identify variables and to distinguish between dependent variables and independent variables. They failed to hold a number of variables at once. However, the metacognitive questions from their peers or teacher were helpful for them to construct the concept of controlling variables. If there is no student who has a high level of thinking in a group, it was necessary to intervene for teacher. A well judged questions from teacher created the cognitive conflict which causes the students to reconstruct their strategy for problem solving and reinforce the control of variables reasoning pattern. From the above results, it is concluded that students' cognitive levels are much related to the verbal interaction patterns. This suggests that teacher should consider individual student's cognitive level in organizing groups and intervene to facilitate the environment for metacognitive interaction.