A STUDY ON INFORMATION PROCESSING ABILITIES IN LABORATORY WORK―Students’ Episodic Memories of Laboratory Work in School Science―

Abstract

In this sudy, episodic memories that university students have concerning their past laboratory work in school science were surveyed. The results show that university students retain in memory many of the scientific experiments they performed at elementary school inter alia, and that more affirmative episodes in experiments are retained than negative ones. In particular, they remember very well experiments on the properties of gasses carried out at elementary and lower secondary schools, and they enumerated experiments using chemicals and dissection of living things as negative episodes. Generally, elementary school children store many of the episodes concerning laboraroty work in school science in their long-term memory. It is therefore important for teachers to know of childrens’ past episodes as well as concepts they already have, so that they could make children recognize the aims and the values of experiments, and cultivate their metacognitive strategies. It is necessary to conduct scientific classes with a joyful atmosphere which assure retention of affirmative memories.