2025 Volume 66 Issue 1 Pages 129-136
The National Institute for Educational Policy Research (2021) analyzes Japanese children’s target realization of the usefulness of science via survey TIMSS2019. That survey question is “I think learning science will help me in my daily life.” Do Japanese children really think that science is not useful in everyday life? In our research, we thought deeply about creating lessons that foster a foundation of useful scientific knowledge among students. Everyday usefulness in daily life should be regarded as a fundamental purpose of learning science. Science should not only be a part of school education, but also part of daily life. We therefore explored learning to foster a deeper understanding of the tools we use in our daily lives. We thought that if we could connect science taught in school with everyday life, the students’ perceived usefulness of science would be increased. We selected and planned a model lesson to help pupils learn about scientific principles and the effective use of everyday tools, in grade 6 of elementary school science in a unit on “the regularity of levers”. We thought that, if the students knew that leverage principles can also be applied to the human body with “body mechanics” used in nursing care sites, they would gain a deeper understanding of the tools they were using. We thus investigated the effect of the model science lesson on the “perceived usefulness” of science. As a result, we learned that the “perceived usefulness” ranking of the class in which body mechanics was incorporated and taught was significantly higher than that of the class in which regular instruction was given, confirming the effectiveness of the model lesson’s approach.
