2020 Volume 60 Issue 3 Pages 675-685
This study focuses on the thinking that transforms the interrogative of “why”, which has no prospect of inquiry, into the question of “what” or “how”, which has utility for scientific inquiry, and aims to develop this thought process in elementary school students. Such a transformation process, from interrogative to question, has already been revealed by previous research; in the literature the process is known as “Recognition of interrogatives - Formation of hypothesis - Generate question.” However, there has been no study investigating elementary school students’ thinking process with regard to transforming interrogatives into questions. We therefore focused on this transformation process, from hypothesis into question (“Formation of hypothesis - Generate question”), and to this end developed tests and a questionnaire on the students’ thinking processes that transform hypotheses into questions. After carrying out the tests and questionnaire, the results revealed that the elementary school students could not adequately transform hypotheses into scientific inquiry-based questions, and, moreover, that the causes were partially attributable to a lack of knowledge about the form of questions that have utility for scientific inquiry.
