• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.170-182
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• 2012

The purpose of this study was to develop learning materials based on the Kepler's abductive reasoning and to identify high school students' rule-inferring strategies on the law of planetary motion. The learning materials including the concepts of solar magnetic field, conservation of figure skater's angular momentum and Kepler's polyhedral theory were developed and the questions about Kepler's 2nd and 3rd law of planetary motion were also created. The participants were 79science high school students and 83general high school students. The patterns and properties of their abductive inference were analyzed. The findings revealed that the students showed 'incomplete analogy abduction', 'analogy abduction' and 'reconstruction' to generate the hypotheses concerning the Mars' motion related to the solar magnetic field. There were more general high school students who showed the incomplete analogy abduction than science high school students. On the other hand, there were more science high school students who showed the analogy abduction and reconstruction strategy than general high school students. Also, they showed 'incomplete analogy abduction', 'analogy abduction' and 'model construction and manipulation' to generate the hypotheses concerning Kepler's second law. A number of general high school students showed the incomplete analogy. It is suggested that because the analogy of figure skater cause the students' alternative framework to use, more detailed demonstration is necessary in class. In addition, students combined Kepler's polyhedral theory with their prior knowledge to infer Kepler's third law.