2012 Volume 53 Issue 2 Pages 359-368
The purpose of this research was to clarify the differences in the idea of life between males and females and among communities. Targeting the sixth-grade elementary school students and the second-grade lower secondary school students, the average values of items included in each basic component of the biological concepts and life concepts constituting the idea of life were obtained as subscale scores by a scale measuring the idea of life developed by Yamaya et al. As a result, the following were revealed: 1 As for the comparison of the idea of life between male students and female students in both academic years above, the values of "Animism" and "Life" of female students were significantly higher than those of male students, and the second-grade lower secondary school female students living in urban areas and female students of both academic years living in rural areas scored significantly higher in "life" than male students did. Furthermore, female students of the second-grade lower secondary school scored significantly high in a larger number of basic concepts than male students of the same academic year did. 2 As for the comparison of the idea of life among communities, students in urban areas scored significantly higher in the fundamental concepts of life. The concepts that the sixth-grade elementary school students scored significantly higher on were the life concepts, and that of the second-grade lower secondary school students were the biological concepts. Male students of both academic years in urban areas scored significantly higher in "Mechanism" than those in rural areas. This result is considered to be caused by the environmental differences between urban areas and rural areas.
