Abstract
The purposes of this study were to clarify the effects of incorporating a teaching strategy of fostering students’ use of “functional viewpoints / ways of thinking” on their ability to make a graph from a table of experimental results and to express it in an equation, to analyze and interpret the table, graph, and equation, and on their awareness of the “significance of cross-curricular learning of science and mathematics, as well as to enhance factors that constitute “the significance of cross-curriculum learning in subject of science and mathematics” in a lower secondary school first-grade science class, with a focus on “Hooke’s Law”. To achieve these aims, we conducted science lessons on Hooke’s law for first-grade junior high school students, utilizing survey questions to evaluate the degree of understanding of the relationship between two quantities and the questionnaire survey on the significance of cross-curriculum learning in subject of science and mathematics. The results demonstrated that the method is indeed effective in fostering both the concept of considering things / phenomena in a proportional relationship from their graphs and the students’ ability to formulate equations from the straight lines of graphs showing proportional relationships. In addition, there was a significant increase in four factors (Factor 2 “functional viewpoints / ways of thinking,” Factor 3 “usefulness of science and mathematics learning,” Factor 4 “learning strategies in science,” and Factor 6 “awareness of formulation / quantification”) between the pre- and post-experimental groups. The results further suggest that the experiment had a certain effect on improving students’ awareness of the significance of cross-curricular learning in science and mathematics. It was thus clarified that the teaching strategy deployed in this study has a certain effect in helping students understand the relationship between two quantities and promoting recognition of the significance of cross-curriculum learning in the subjects of science and mathematics.
