ゼブラフィッシュを用いた発生教材の開発と小学校理科における授業実践

抄録

Japanese killifish are commonly used in elementary school science especially as teaching material for embryonic development. However, some problems in the observation of embryos have been reported by previous researches. Due to small numbers, children typically have difficulty in observations of the embryos. It is also difficult for them to distinguish and understand the morphological change in the embryos due to the presence of attaching filaments on the surface of egg membrane and oil droplets in the egg cytoplasm that occur in embryo. We have developed and tested teaching materials that provide students with opportunity to observe embryonic development in the fish, Danio rerio.As a result of our experimentations, we have shown that Danio rerio has merits for classroom studies of embryology. Eggs can be easily spawned by artificial methods, and several hundreds of eggs will be produced. Development from eggs to juvenile fish will only take two or three days and students will easily be able to observe changes in the embryo to include the early stage. Through classroom observations, we found that children were very interested in Danio rerio and they could easily observe their entire embryonic development. Increasing of student interest in fish embryonic development was demonstrated.