We analyzed introductory description of the law of universal gravitation (hereafter UG) in foreign textbooks of physics at upper secondary school level. We investigated eleven textbooks which are used in Australia, China, France, FRG (West Germany), GDR (East Ge皿 1any),Indonesia, UK, USA, and USSR. Our study was made from five viewpoints: (1) knowledge of dynamics given before introduction of the law of UG: (2) the connection with Kepler's law; (3) the application of the history of science; (4) the process for deriving the law of UG; (5) the foundations of the universality of gravity. Our findings are as follows: (1) There are a variety of descriptions of UG in these textbooks; Among them, french "PHYSIQUE" describes UG simplest, treating it as just one of examples of forces, while USA's "PROJECT PHYSICS" deals with UG in most detail, regarding the law of UG as very important not only to understand the natural world but to illustrate the scientific method. (2) In many of these textbooks, the law of inverse-square and the proportionality to mass for UG are derived simultaneously from Kepler's third law, as done in Japanese textbooks of today. On the other hand, in a few textbooks such as UK's "NUFFIELD PHYSICS", the proportionality to mass is derived from the fact that an accerelation of gravity on the earth is independent of the mass of a relevant object. We consider that the latter derivation is more reasonable than the former. (3) Generally speaking, more acceptable to students are the textbooks where the law of UG is derived in more accordance with "PRINCIPIA" and where more historical view of science is adopted.

To investigate children's interest in small animals, the study was made by means of questionnaire to kindergartners with their parents and girl students. Children's experiences with a small animal were classified in three categories. The first was an experience in having seen it; the second, in being able to touch it; the last, in having captured it. Among these three experiences, the following equation seemed to be obtained, C=STY where S, T and C were respectively the ratio of children having the first to the last categories of experiences to total children. Y was the index of easiness to capture a small animal. C was statistically subject to parents' C only when their parents had similar experiences. Referring to boys and girls separately, the sets of S, T and Y values of animals were changed and others unchanged as children grew up. The experience with a dragonfly, for instance, boys changed the interest type from (S=T>Y) to (S=T=Y), while girls did it from (S>T>Y) to (S=T>Y). With an ant, the type of boys belonged to (S=T=Y) at any age. But the type of girls was changed from (S=T>Y) to (S=T=Y). These changes were assumed to represent the development of children's interest in small animals. Therefore, the processes of the development types acquired from 14 animal species could be shown in a diagram.

This study intends to clarify pupils' ability of differentiation of weight from volume in elementary and lower secondary schools. A conventional style used in similar studies is a pencil-and-paper test, which requests pupils to fill in question items only. It has advantages as easy to control conditions and to research a lot of pupils at a time, but it has also disadvantages as hard to understand situations. I made it some improvements in this study, namely, to incorporate experiment, operation, observation and judgement in order to clarify thinking processes of pupils. Main view points of this research are as follows: 1.Difference between the results gained by a pencil-and-paper test and the ones by an improved test. 2.Relation between the grades of pupils and the abilities of differentiation. 3.Change of the ratio of the pupils educable on differentiation with grade.

In this research, our aim is to improve teaching of the mole concepts which is one of the most important and difficult concepts in the upper secondary school chemistry. The method used in our research is as follows: First we examined the study of the mole concepts in recent science educational papers in the U.S.A., U.K. and our country. Next, we analyze SCIENCE I textbooks. Then, we gave out questionaries to 698 high school students who have studied. chemistry to determine how well they understand the mole concepts. In this research, through the analysis of both SCIENCE I textbooks and the responses of the students, we obtained the following results. 1.Most of SCIENCE I textbook didn't describe mole concepts with SI units. Only four textbooks used definition with SI units. 2.Only nine textbooks of eighteen SCIENCE I defined the mole as a counting unit. 3.The necessity of the introduction on the mole concepts was emphasized because particle is so small that we use it with difficulty. 4.Many students regarded the mole as groups of 6.02x1023 particles. Definition with SI units was used only in one upper secondary school. No other schools used this definition.

It has been said in various respects that students have a lot of difficulty in understanding "force", especially the force acting on static things, and that many students can not grasp the force shown by force vector. We have already known through our research that in the gravity vector problems there are lots of students who answer reversely, in other words they confuse the body giving force' the earth' with that given force. So first of all, in order to find out why students give wrong answers to such problems, we decided to study the types of the problems which cause wrong answers. The seventh and eighth graders of our school solved ten problems, which ask what force the force vector means. As a result, we have found that the students make more mistakes about attractive force problems than about repulsive force problems. To take another step, we analyzed the data by the quantification method of the third type, and found that the problems are classified into attractive force group and repulsive force group, and that repulsive force group is classified into magnetic force group and counter-force group. Judging from the above, we have found that attractive force vector and repulsive force vector require respectively different information processing of the students and that repulsive force vector problems are more difficult for the students.

Most of the scientific concept that are taught in lower secondary schools are born, developed and bred within the logical structure of a mature discipline. To acquire these, students are demanded on manipulating the parts of a concepts and putting them together in different ways, e.g. the concept of speed is acquired in this operative fashion when the time and distance variables are manipulated in various ways to increase and decrease the amount of speed. These concepts are generally called the relational concepts. The INRC group, that had been defined as the logical operations by J. Piaget, can be adopted as the model that explain these concept formation process. The students who had acquired these operations can comprehend the relational concepts. In this study, the authors have surveyed the extent how the students had acquired these operations. The results of this study has indicated that only 20% of students in 3rd grade could acquire these. In other words, only these students can comprehend the relational concepts.