Exploring Korean Middle School Students’ View about Scientific Inquiry
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Il-ho Yang 1, Sang-woo Park 2, Jung-yun Shin 1 * , Sung-man Lim 1
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1 Korea National University of Education
2 Cheongju National University of Education
* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Background:
The aim of this study is to examine Korean middle school students’ view about scientific inquiry with the Views About Scientific Inquiry (VASI) Questionnaire.

Material and methods:
This instrument deals with 8 aspects of scientific inquiry. 282 Korean middle school students participated in this study, and their responses were classified as informed, mixed, and naïve.

Results:
The results revealed that Korean middle school students primarily held mixed or naïve views about scientific inquiry. To discover why students held these views, their responses were analyzed in detail. For instance, they did not understand the meaning of ‘experiment’, ‘scientific’, ‘data’, and ‘evidence’ well. They understood scientific terminology and scientific inquiry in everyday contexts. Students also tended to regard science process skill as scientific method.

Conclusions:
In general, Korean middle school students held mixed or naïve views about scientific inquiry. According to the results mentioned above, explicit and reflective instruction is necessary to develop students’ views about scientific inquiry.

Keywords

License

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

https://doi.org/10.12973/eurasia.2017.00765a

EURASIA J Math Sci Tech Ed, 2017 - Volume 13 Issue 7, pp. 3935-3958

Publication date: 19 Jun 2017

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Article Downloads: 1791

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