• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.98-109
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• 2007

Over the last twenty years, farmers in Western Australia have begun to change land management practices to minimise the effects of salinity to agricultural land. A farm plan is often used as a guide to implement changes. Most plans are based on minimal data and an understanding of only surface water flow. Thus farm plans do not effectively address the processes that lead to land salinisation. A project at Broomehill in the south-west of Western Australia applied an approach using a large suite of geospatial data that measured surface and subsurface characteristics of the regolith. In addition, other data were acquired, such as information about the climate and the agricultural history. Fundamental to the approach was the collection of airborne geophysical data over the study area. This included radiometric data reflecting soils, magnetic data reflecting bedrock geology, and SALTMAP electromagnetic data reflecting regolith thickness and conductivity. When interpreted, these datasets added paddock-scale information of geology and hydrogeology to the other datasets, in order to make on-farm and in-paddock decisions relating directly to the mechanisms driving the salinising process. The location and design of surface-water management structures such as grade banks and seepage interceptor banks was significantly influenced by the information derived from the airborne geophysical data. To evaluate the effectiveness ofthis planning., one whole-farm plan has been monitored by the Department of Agriculture and the farmer since 1996. The implemented plan shows a positive cost-benefit ratio, and the farm is now in the top 5% of farms in its regional productivity benchmarking group. The main influence of the airborne geophysical data on the farm plan was on the location of earthworks and revegetation proposals. There had to be a hydrological or hydrogeological justification, based on the site-specific data, for any infrastructure proposal. This approach reduced the spatial density of proposed works compared to other farm plans not guided by site-specific hydrogeological information.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.805-815
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• 2015

The Korean education curriculum is making efforts to improve education to foster competencies that the future society demands through the 2007 and 2009 revised curriculum. The revised curricula focus on enhanced articulation for the quality curriculum. In this study, the curriculum is analyzed for vertical and horizontal articulation. In addition, the study found a problem in Korea's curriculum through international comparison and sought improvement. Furthermore, the study compared internationally articulation of the concept of photosynthesis, of which the results are as follows. First, our science curriculum focuses on vertical articulation and has relatively neglected the problem of horizontal articulation. To compensate for this problem, curriculum design should introduce aspects of 'nature' and 'environment' and should consider the interests and concerns of students, as countries with high horizontal articulation do. Second, the actual education field has a problem with the a lack of continuity and sequence because of concentration of concept in a specific grade or simply repeating the concept across multiple grades. These results have led to alternative proposals that should arrange basis of concept configuration such as 'Big Idea' and should establish the adoption of 'systems' frequently appearing in the other curricula. Finally, there may be mentioned a lack of research on students' learning progression, which can be a common standard of horizontal and vertical articulation. Research on learning progression has been a trend overseas, but there exists no study to fit Korea's situation, so education fields need to conduct the appropriate research on learning progression as part of the commitment to high-quality curriculum.

• The Mathematical Education
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• v.62 no.3
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• pp.381-400
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• 2023

As the era of solving various and complex problems in the real world using artificial intelligence and big data appears, problem-solving competencies that can solve realistic problems through a mathematical approach are required. In fact, the 2015 revised mathematics curriculum and the 2022 revised mathematics curriculum emphasize mathematical modeling as an activity and competency to solve real-world problems. However, the real-world problems presented in domestic and international textbooks have a high proportion of artificial problems that rarely occur in real-world. Accordingly, domestic and international countries are paying attention to the reality of mathematical modeling tasks and suggesting the need for authentic tasks that reflect students' daily lives. However, not only did previous studies focus on theoretical proposals for reality, but studies analyzing teachers' perceptions of reality and their competency to reflect reality in the task are insufficient. Accordingly, this study aims to analyze in-service mathematics teachers' perception of reality among the characteristics of tasks for mathematical modeling and the in-service mathematics teachers' competency for designing the mathematical modeling tasks. First of all, five criteria for satisfying the reality were established by analyzing literatures. Afterward, teacher training was conducted under the theme of mathematical modeling. Pre- and post-surveys for 41 in-service mathematics teachers who participated in the teacher training was conducted to confirm changes in perception of reality. The pre- and post- surveys provided a task that did not reflect reality, and in-service mathematics teachers determined whether the task given in surveys reflected reality and selected one reason for the judgment among five criteria for reality. Afterwards, frequency analysis was conducted by coding the results of the survey answered by in-service mathematics teachers in the pre- and post- survey, and frequencies were compared to confirm in-service mathematics teachers' perception changes on reality. In addition, the mathematical modeling tasks designed by in-service teachers were evaluated with the criteria for reality to confirm the teachers' competency for designing mathematical modeling tasks reflecting the reality. As a result, it was shown that in-service mathematics teachers changed from insufficient perception that only considers fragmentary criterion for reality to perceptions that consider all the five criteria of reality. In particular, as a result of analyzing the basis for judgment among in-service mathematics teachers whose judgment on reality was reversed in the pre- and post-survey, changes in the perception of in-service mathematics teachers was confirmed, who did not consider certain criteria as a criterion for reality in the pre-survey, but considered them as a criterion for reality in the post-survey. In addition, as a result of evaluating the tasks designed by in-service mathematics teachers for mathematical modeling, in-service mathematics teachers showed the competency to reflect reality in their tasks. However, among the five criteria for reality, the criterion for "situations that can occur in students' daily lives," "need to solve the task," and "require conclusions in a real-world situation" were relatively less reflected. In addition, it was found that the proportion of teachers with low task development competencies was higher in the teacher group who could not make the right judgment than in the teacher group who could make the right judgment on the reality of the task. Based on the results of these studies, this study provides implications for teacher education to enable mathematics teachers to apply mathematical modeling lesson in their classes.