生物教育における文脈依存性に関する研究

―児童の持つ人間と動物の各々に対する性認識の比較―

抄録

Recent cognitive psychology has clarified that our knowledge and abilities are extremely related to each situation, and the application range is narrow. In general, this phenomenon is called context dependency, domain specificity.

In the present study, we attempted to clarify the existence of this context dependency of knowledge and how it changes according to the grade level of the children. Two sets of questions were made. All questions concerned sex cognition. One set of questions concerned the case of humans (human context) and the other one concerned the case of animals (animal context). Both sets were composed of four questions: the first one related to sex difference, the second one related to reasons for the existence of sex, the third one related to a mechanism for birth, and the fourth one related to the hereditary relationship to the father.

The results are the following three points: (1) the answers of many children depend on the context; (2) the child’s context dependency decreases the higher the grade level of the child; (3) children have a different characteristic understanding of sex in each context (human, animal). Depending on the question, between 30% to 70% of the fifth grade children showed some degree of context dependency although the content of animals is directly compared with that of humans in the present fifth grade curriculum. This indicates that the children’s context dependency is considerably strong.