2022 Volume 63 Issue 1 Pages 189-204
The first purpose of this study was to classify questions of observations and experiments in the lower secondary school science textbook certified by Japan’s Ministry of Education in 2020, based on Sekine et al. (2012), and to clarify the characteristics of the questions therein by comparing them with those in the lower secondary school science textbook certified in 2011. The second purpose of this study was to clarify the characteristics of questions by examining their relationship with the characteristic skills organized according to the three perspectives of Yamada e t al. (2021). From the results of our analysis, the following two points were clarified: (1) The number of verifiable questions such as “how+verb”, “what+noun”, and “what” has increased from the 2011 text to the 2020 text, while the number of difficult questions meant to elicit binary “yes/no” answers has decreased. (2) While questions meant to help students find relationships and regularities were plentiful, “what” questions specifically included a lot of “quantitative” and “hypothesis setting” elicitations, utilization of questions as a means to inquiry and questions that encouraged observation, experimentation, or work had less “hypothesis setting” and “variable control” in 2020.
