• Journal of Elementary Mathematics Education in Korea
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-98
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• 1997

A practice is classified into the practice as a content and the practice as a method. The former means that the practical nature of mathematical knowledge itself should be a content of mathematics and the latter means that one should teach the mathematical knowledge in such a way as the practical nature is not damaged. The practical nature of mathematics means mathematician's activity as it is actually done. Activities of the mathematician are not only discovering strict proofs or building axiomatic system but informal thinking activities such as generalization, analogy, abstraction, induction etc. In this study, it is found that the most instructive ones for the future users of mathematics are such practice as content. For the practice as a method, students might learn, by becoming apprentice mathematicians, to do what master mathematicians do in their everyday practice. Classrooms are cultural milieux and microsoms of mathematical culture in which there are sets of beliefs and values that are perpetuated by the day-to-day practices and rituals of the cultures. Therefore, the students' sense of ‘what mathematics is really about’ is shaped by the culture of school mathematics. In turn, the sense of what mathematics is really all about determines how the students use the mathematics they have learned. In this sense, the practice on which classroom instruction might be modelled is that of mathematicians at work. To learn mathematics is to enter into an ongoing conversation conducted between practitioners who share common language. So students should experience mathematics in a way similar to the way mathematicians live it. It implies a view of mathematics classrooms as a places in which classroom activity is directed not simply toward the acquisition of the content of mathematics in the form of concepts and procedures but rather toward the individual and collaborative practice of mathematical thinking.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.581-596
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• 2013

The aim of this study was to identify students' views on the orientation of science and to investigate the relationship between their views and decision-making on socio-scientific issues (SSI). In this study, 27 university students attending a science course were asked to discuss four controversial issues: the Toyota recall, the green car, the global warming and swine influenza (influenza A (H1N1)). The study was comprised of two stages. At the first stage, we examined students' views on the nature of science and on the orientation of science with the open-ended questionnaire based on VNOS and VOSTS. While they held relatively similar views on the nature of science, their views on the orientation of science were distinct as pragmatic, intrinsic, communal and ethical views. At the second stage, to examine the role of their views on the orientation of science in decision-making, we selected four students who had similar views on NOS but different views on the orientation of science. The four students were selected from each group of views on the orientation of science and their decision-making processes were analyzed following grounded theory. Across SSIs, they relied upon their views on the orientation of science as the strategies for decision, though considered different perception, and causal and contextual conditions. This study indicates that understanding students' views on the orientation of science would be helpful for achieving scientific literacy for informed decision.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.206-217
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• 2010

This study aims to explore preservice teachers' overall views of nature of science and compare their views by gender and certificate area (biology vs. non-biology teachers). In addition, a comparison with American preservice teachers' views was also implemented. The Views of Nature of Science (Abd-El-Khalick, 1998), an openended questionnaire, is utilized to explore participants' views of nature of science. Along with 'definition of science', six aspects of the nature of science, (1) theories and laws, (2) tentativeness, (3) social and cultural embeddedness, (4) creativity, (5) theory-laden, and (6) inference, were investigated. The qualitative result indicates that the participants' first image of science was about the method of science such as observations and experiments. Furthermore, these preservice science teachers particularly have a difficulty in differentiating between scientific theories and laws, and understanding the importance of creation and imagination in developing scientific knowledge. In addition, compared to American preservice teachers' view of the nature of science, Korean preservice teachers possess naive views in creative and imaginative aspect. Interestingly, biology teachers demonstrated lower understanding in theories and laws as well as tentativeness of scientific knowledge. However, there is no difference by gender.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.211-222
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• 2003

Science has developed along with human society and history. In today's society ruled by pluralism, an educational approach using the historical materials which represent their own cultures will make science education more effective. The purpose of this study was to search for the meaning of science education related with a history of science, and to suggest the possibility for science education based on Korean history of science. The conclusions of this study is below: (1) The history of science is useful to teaching science in K-12 setting. That is because it was helpful to make a scientific concept and to invite student's interest about learning science. Moreover, it was most suitable to teach the nature of science as well as the relation between science and society. (2) A model which consists of 15 types of science education materials using Korean history was suggested. This model plays a potential role as a R&D framework of developing teaching & learning materials based on the history of Korean Science.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.169-179
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• 2008

In this study, 46 teaching materials for understanding the nature of science (NOS) were developed based on the 42 statements describing the NOS. Each teaching material involves scientific knowledge and scientific inquiry skills as well as NOS statements. Teaching materials consist of students' learning worksheets and teachers' guides. Among the materials, 11 materials for understanding the nature of scientific thinking (NOST) were applied to 3 scientifically gifted students. As results, the degree of difficulty was appropriate and students showed interests in scientific thinking rather than new concepts or inquiry activities involved in the materials. It was expected that understating the NOST would be helpful for conducting scientific inquiry in more authentic way. And similarly to the Park's (2007) theoretical discussions about the relationship between the NOS and scientific creativity, students actually responded that undertrading the NOST could help their creativity. Therefore, it was expected that teaching the NOST would be plausible elements for teaching scientific creativity.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.185-198
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• 2018

This paper was written for the purpose of using as the theoretical basic data of judgment in the situation that there is a growing demand for intelligent design theory to be taught in public schools along with evolution theory. In order to verify the possibility that intelligent design theory, which has little empirical evidence unlike evolutionary theory, could be a scientific theory, what intelligence is and whether the trace of intelligence is actually found in nature was confirmed through literature. If intelligent elements, which are traces of intelligence in nature, are discovered empirically in nature, then intelligent design theory can be recognized as a scientific theory and can also be taught in public schools. The identity and traces of intelligence were found in relevant literature and the traces are found not only in various artificial products derived from human beings such as thinking, knowledge, and civilization, but also in all phenomena of nature. Based on these results, this paper provides a discussion on how the evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory should be handled in the field of school education, as well as how to resolve the conflicts between evolutionary theory and intelligent design theory.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.15-27
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• 2015

This study investigated whether there was a difference of the change in perspective of the nature of science depending on subjects of the history of science, after designing for two kinds of topics of role play programs based on the history of science to be transformed into a modern perspective. Before the history of science-role plays, the degree of the modern perspective was statistically no difference between group I(the atomic model transition-role play) and group II(the Mendeleev's periodic table-role play). However after treatment of the history of science-role plays for the each group, the degree of group I was higher than the degree of group II in the modern perspective. The results of this study indicate that the degree of changes into modern perspective of the nature of science by performing a history of science-role play may be depend on the subject of the history of science combined with the role play, and suggest the possibility that may be more effective to change the nature of science into the modern perspective, in case of performing of role play based on the history of science that includes the scientific knowledge established by a number of scientists with time series.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.996-1007
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• 2004

In this study, we investigated the effects of small group discussion using episodes from the history of science on students' understanding about the nature of science (NOS), achievement, enjoyment of science lessons, and science learning motivation. Participants were 138 ninth graders from a middle school in Seoul and they were assigned to a control group and a treatment group. Students in the treatment group were provided with two contrasting perspectives concerning the NOS and were encouraged to discuss them in small groups. The intervention lasted for 5 class periods. The results revealed that students of both the control group and the treatment group were found to possess similar views about NOS in a NOS pretest, whereas students of the treatment group exhibited more sophisticated understanding in a NOS posttest. The scores of the treatment group were also significantly higher than those of the control group in an enjoyment of science lessons test and a learning motivation test. However, there was no significant difference between two groups in the achievement test scores.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.351-364
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• 1998

This thesis analyzes the nature of proof in the perspective on the philosophy of mathematics. such as absolutism, quasi-empiricism and social constructivism. And this thesis searches for the improvement of teaching proof in the light of the result of those analyses of the nature of proof. Though the analyses of the nature of proof in the perspective on the philosophy of mathematics, it is revealed that proof is a dynamic reasoning process unifying the way of analytical thought and the way of synthetical thought, and plays remarkably important roles such as justification, discovery and conviction. Hence we should teach proof as a dynamic reasoning process unifying the way of analytic thought and the way of synthetic thought, avoiding the mistake of dealing with proof as a unilaterally synthetic method. At the same time, we should make students have the needs of proof in a natural way by providing them with the contexts of both justification and discovery simultaneously. Finally, we should introduce the aspect of proof that can be represented as conviction, understanding, explanation and communication to school mathematics.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.455-474
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• 2011

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which scientists reflect on the scientific practices, based on the premise that reflection is one of key elements for shaping scientific identities. This paper specifically considers scientists' reflections as the processes in which their senses of ethical issues and the value of science are articulated. To do so, the study developed a narrative inquiry for exploring the value of scientists' stories. Fourteen professional scientists' stories were collected in the context of the stem cell research, in ways that foreground their reflections on current scientific practices and the surrounding socio-cultural conditions. As for ethical issues, scientists' stories were analysed in terms of four claims regarding the themes of bioethics, integrity, scientific issues and communication. Furthermore, scientists' reflections on the value of science were analysed in relation to the elements of nature of science. Based on the results, discussion focused on the value of science stories as an instrument with which to guide students into the enculturation in the practices of scientific culture.