2012 Volume 35 Issue 1 Pages 1-9
The purpose of this study is to examine the learning situation of students when they participate in activities such as considering the results of observations and experiments. In addition, we also aimed to derive implications for teaching methods based on our findings. In order to achieve these goals, we created a questionnaire with 15 items and surveyed a total of 1,325 junior high school students of all grades. The following three points were clarified by the results: (1) Students don't derive their own thoughts/considerations sufficiently in comparison to the activity of creating hypotheses. (2) The activity of students looking at the considerations summarized by the teacher and then stating their view is often carried out rather than students creating their own hypotheses and deriving their own considerations. (3) Although it's difficult to make a connection with the active task of students deriving their own considerations by merely having them look at the summary compiled by the teacher and then state their view, by learning how to create a hypothesis and derive their own considerations using the teacher's summary as a guide, students do actually become able to derive their own considerations. These results suggest that a teaching method where teachers show students how to derive their own considerations and how to create the necessary hypotheses for doing so, rather than merely displaying a model-like discussion from the beginning, is essential.
