A Study on the Student's Spatial Cognition In Science Education (II) -on the direction concept-

Abstract

In the science education the direction is one of the most important concepts, and we can find many learning activities with relation to the concept in science textbooks. In U.S. A. projects (ESS, SAPA, MAPS, SCIS and so on), the learning activities on it have been established variously, too. Following the previous study, in this study the author intended to investigate the student's cognitive ability on the direction concept, which is a element of the spatial concept. Piaget’s ‘Three mountains task (1956)'suggested that it was necessary for cognizing the direction to locomote the viewpoint. According to Piaget's theory, the author uses locomoting the viewpoint, as the method the examine the attainment of cognizing it. The following findings were obtained: (1) The left-right direction is not sufficiently understood, and the locomoting of viewpoint is necessary to cognize this concept. (2) Through elementary and lower seこondary school students, the cognitive ability on the parallel concept is very poor. (3) Most students do not understand the compass direction, and confuse it with the up-down concept (4) The number of the students who understand fully the horizontality-perpendicularity concept, was about 50 % in 6th grade. In the wrong answers three types are recognized. (5) Few students understand the compass direction in the three dimensional space, and most subjects understand it as two dimensional direction.