• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.64 no.4
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• pp.210-224
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to investigate science teachers' orientation toward scientific inquiry-based teaching. In this study, five middle school science teachers formed and participated in a teacher learning community for scientific inquiry-based instruction during one year. Data collection consisted of pre and post questionnaire and interviews, audio-recordings of teachers' collaborative lesson planning and reflection on teaching practice, and field notes of participant teachers' teaching practice and follow-up interviews. Data analysis indicated that there were four orientations toward scientific inquiry-based teaching. They were knowledge and beliefs about 'goals of scientific inquiry-based teaching', 'scientific inquiry-based teaching and learning', 'argumentation-based teaching and learning', and 'nature of science and science inquiry'. Teachers' collaboration in a teacher learning community would be effective in facilitating teachers' orientation to scientific inquiry-based teaching.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.294-305
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• 2012

Scientific literacy has long been as one of the key goals of science education, and using scientific inquiry in school science has became an important objective to be achieved. The processes of scientific inquiry consist of proposing/developing inquiry question, designing and conducting investigation, collecting, analyzing and interpreting data, and communicating the results. However, most students experience mainly collecting and transforming data in inquiry processes in science class and they are barely exposed to the opportunities of proposing/developing inquiry questions. Middle school earth science preservice teachers participated in this study (N=36) and their abilities of developing inquiry questions were surveyed. Participants' abilities of developing inquiry questions were investigated whether they were enhanced with activities using the Inquiry Questions Development Guide (IQDG). Also, this study was interested in whether there was any relationship between abilities of developing inquiry questions and designing inquiry investigation. The results of this study were as follows; first, the level and preciseness of inquiry questions and its preciseness developed by participating teachers were enhanced after experiencing IQDG. In addition, teachers' dominating inquiry question-types were two: one is a 'relationship-inquiry question' in which students could discover the relationship between results found in the given experimental situations and the other one is a 'why-how inquiry problem' in which students could explore a cause or a process that results in the outcomes. Finally, the higher level of and preciseness the of inquiry questions were identified as an important factor the determined teachers' abilities of designing more logical investigation. A process of proposing/developing inquiry question was identified as one of the most important processes contributing to a success of scientific inquiry investigation.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.204-217
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• 2008

This study analyzed the inquiry activities appearing in the astronomy sections of elementary, middle and highschool level science textbooks according to the five essential features of inquiry in the classroom as proposed by the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2000), and SAPA (Science-A Process Approach). On the basis of this analysis, it is clear that the science textbook inquiry activities released the limitation to meet the goal of science education, namely scientific literacy, as it has been laid out by the 7th Science Educational Curriculum. This study revealed that the features of scientific inquiry which are most frequently used in the astronomy sections of science textbooks are 'data collection' and 'form explanation', whereas the features of 'oriented-question', 'evaluate explanations' and 'communicate and justify' rarely appeared. The analysis of inquiry activities by SAPA showed that the basic inquiry skills of 'observing', 'communicating' and 'manipulating materials' were used with increasing frequency according to grade level, and the integrated skills of 'investigating', 'creating models', 'interpreting data' and 'experimenting' were more emphasized in the textbooks. Therefore, it is suggested that students be provided with more opportunities to experience all the features of scientific inquiry and scientific processes as envisioned by the 7th Science Educational Curriculum in order to achieve the stated goal of scientific literacy. Science educators should be required to develop new lesson modules which will allow students to experience authentic scientific inquiry. It is crucial for science teachers to reflect upon and develop their understanding and teaching strategies regarding scientific inquiry through professional development programs in teacher education.

• 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 The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.757-767
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• 2002

This study investigated the effects of scientific inquiry experiments emphasizing social interaction on the academic achievement, the ability for science inquiry and the learning motivation of the students. To examine the differences among the classes of scientific inquiry experiments according to the way of organizing small groups, the effects of the group in homogeneous cognitive level and the group in heterogeneous cognitive level were compared. 255 7th-graders were grouped into the treatment group and the control group. After the treatment group received the scientific inquiry experimental lessons emphasizing social interaction and the control group received traditional lessons for one year, academic achievement, ability for scientific inquiry, and learning motivation were examined. These inquiry experiments were composed of four steps which are eliciting, familiarizing, constructing and bridging. And students can interact with peers and teachers through the process of relating observed phenomena to concept, constructing experiment procedure, and eliciting results. The ANCOVA results revealed that there were significant effects of science inquiry experiments emphasizing social interaction on the academic achievement, the ability for scientific inquiry and the learning motivation of the students. The significant academic achievement of the students in most of the cognitive levels, if not all, was found and degree of improvement in the ability for scientific inquiry was lower than that in the academic achievement. Concerning the effects according to the way of organizing small groups, there were significant improvement in academic achievement and learning motivation of the group in homogeneous cognitive level compared to the group in heterogeneous cognitive level. These results indicate that social interaction in learning is important and it has positive influences on the improvement in academic achievement and ability for scientific inquiry of students.

• Human Ecology Research
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• v.53 no.1
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• pp.67-80
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• 2015

This study aimed to develop a convergent arts and science program for 5yearold children and to evaluate this effectiveness of the program. To meet the purpose of this study, 34 children (aged, 5 year) were divided into two groups, namely the experimental group and the control group. To the experimental group, the creative arts and science convergence program of interest in this study was delivered over a period of 8 weeks. The children of the control group were delivered the Nuri Curriculum (standardized educational curriculum targeted for 3- to 5year olds) during the same experimental period. The levels of the children's creativity were assessed using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking-Figural and those of their scientific inquiry ability were tested by using the Scientific Inquiry Ability Assessment Scale. The analysis of covariance calculated using by IBM SPSS ver. 21.0 revealed that the experimental group scored higher in creativity and scientific inquiry than did the control group. The results indicated that the proposed convergent arts and science program was effective in promoting creativity and scientific inquiry ability of young children. In this paper, along with the main results of this study, the implications for research and practice are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.759-772
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to understand characteristics of eighth graders' conclusions presented in their self-directed scientific inquiry reports. We developed a framework, Analysis of Conclusions of Self-Directed Scientific Inquiry, to analyze students' conclusions. We then compared the conclusions with the inquiry questions students generated to find out whether the questions affected students' conclusions. In addition, we analyzed students' responses from the survey about their perceptions of drawing conclusions. According to the results, the conclusions were characterized into two categories, i.e., scientific basic assumption and scientific explanation. Almost half of the students' conclusions fall under the scientific basic assumptions. Most of the scientific explanations were deductive explanations and inductive explanations. Then, the kinds of conclusions were affected by the inquiry questions because the scientific explanations were made more than the scientific basic assumptions in answering the inquiry questions. Some students couldn't recognize differences between conclusions and experiment results.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.54-67
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• 1995

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.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.61 no.5
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• pp.263-276
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to investigate the understanding of nature of scientific knowledge and attitudes toward scientific inquiry of pre-service science teachers experienced open inquiry. The study was conducted in 10 sessions of open inquiry-based chemistry experiment. The subjects were 40 pre-service science teachers recruited from the experiment class. They received pre-test, mid-test, post-test on understanding nature of scientific knowledge and attitudes toward scientific inquiry of open inquiry activities. 20 pre-service science teachers among them participated in the interview. The results of this study are as follows. First, there was a significant difference in pre-service science teachers' understanding of the nature of the scientific knowledge (p<.05). In particular, understanding of creativity and sociality parts improved gradually. Second, pre-service science teachers' attitude toward scientific inquiry had changed negatively until the middle of the semester, and then changed positively later. The post-test score was significantly higher than the mid-test score (p<.05).

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.31 no.7
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• pp.798-812
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to investigate beginning teachers' views of scientific inquiry envisioned in science education reform, which is the main goal of science education at schools. Teachers' views about scientific inquiry influence their students' learning in the classroom, so it is significant to investigate teachers' views about the scientific inquiry. 126 beginning science teachers participated in this study. The survey asking teachers' view of general scientific inquiry, nature of science (NOS) and the relationship of science, technology, and society (STS), was developed and implemented for 30 minutes. Alternative views of scientific inquiry including NOS and STS were emerged through data analysis with open coding system. The reliability and validity of data collection and data analysis were constructed through the discussion with experts in science education. The results of this study were as follows. Participants defined scientific inquiry as opportunities of 'Hands-On' and 'Minds-On' or its combination rather than 'Hearts-On'. However, teachers demonstrated the view of 'Hands-On' for the purpose of scientific inquiry and for teachers' roles in its implementation. The view of 'Hearts-On' about scientific inquiry was not identified. The naive view of NOS were identified more than informative one. More positive attitude about the relationship of STS was released. The implication was made in teacher education, especially structured induction program for beginning teachers.