2017 Volume 57 Issue 4 Pages 325-336
There is an apparent need to help schoolchildren and students develop talents and abilities that are necessary for their future. To foster students’ talents and abilities, improvement of their learning environment is indispensable. As for science, it is required to improve both teaching materials and teaching tools and to achieve a suitable combination of such materials and tools for use in class. With regard to teaching tools, factors that need to be improved include measuring devices that are easy to use for experiments and measurement, clarity in the results of science experiments, safety, and simple preparation for experiments. We expect that improving learning environments could help students learn more deeply and cultivate their desire to learn. Therefore, this study involves science classes at the elementary school level in which the amount of oxygen generated through photosynthesis was measured, and is designed to compare and analyze how a difference in learning environments influences students’ learning, as well as to evaluate teaching materials and tools used in class. As a study method, we used the same teaching materials but prepared two different types of teaching tools. Adopting different teaching tools leads to the creation of different learning environments for students. Thus, we compared and analyzed how this difference in teaching tools changed students’ learning and considered crucial factors of teaching materials from the perspective of the learning environment. Two types of teaching tools used for comparison and analysis were a gas detector tube based on the “Courses of Study for the Elementary and Secondary Schools” revised in 2008 and an oxygen sensor employing an air-zinc battery (Takahashi-style oxygen sensor), which has been developed for science education. This study reports that we observed a remarkable difference in the quality of elementary students’ knowledge and skill acquisition, as well as the cultivation of their curiosity, after the students carried out measurement by themselves in the pilot class.
