Study on Factors to Affect Students' Notice to the Natural Things and Phenomena in the Pre-service Teacher Training Course

Abstract

In order to foster children's problem-solving ability, it is first necessary to increase the problem-discovery ability and problem-acquiring ability as an initial stage of the problem-solving process. To develop a teaching method for fostering the problem-discovery ability and problem-acquiring ability in the nature, we think it important that we demonstrate the structure of factors affecting students' notice to the natural things and phenomena which is the base for these abilities. The aim of our study is to clarify the causal relationship among factors to affect their notice to the natural things and phenomena for them who take the course of science teaching method for the primary school. We conducted the inspection for "notice to the natural things and phenomena" as a purpose variable and "experience in familiar nature", "favorable impression of mathematics", "confidence in natural science", "intellectual curiosity about nature and scientific technology", "experience in scientific research", "favorable impression of the natural science", and "experience in making things" as explanatory variables and inspected statistically the casual relationship among them. As a consequence, we found that the group of students who obtained high scores for "notice to the natural things and phenomena" showed a significantly higher average of the following five factors of "experience in familiar nature", "confidence in natural science", "intellectual curiosity about nature and scientific technology", "experience in scientific research", and "favorable impression of the natural science". This finding suggests that "notice to the natural things and phenomena" is an ability that is nurtured by intertwining these five factors in the complicated way.