At the elementary education level in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), social and scientific areas which are geared towards the learning of the discipline known as "Heimatkunde" of the subject "German" can be found in both the new and the old programs. In this research, the author examined how the learning of scientific areas was revised compared with the new and the old courses of study in "Heimatkunde." In this study, a survey on the revision of courses of study was firstly made using mainly "Heimatkunde." Next, the author defined the reasons and subjects for revision, and then the process of concretely revising them.was also clarified in this study. At the revision of "Heimatkunde," the learning areas were mainly divided into two, which are known as social and scientific. As a result of the establishment of specialty and systematization of knowledge in each area intended, the author found out the following in relation to the scientific area: (1) In the first grade, an increase in teaching materials and school hours has been made allowing the learning about weather phenomenon, plants and animals through four seasons, and also the solidification of the topics in connection with those in the kindergarten. (2) In the other grades, from grades 2 to 4, the topics being learned at present include the close interrelationship of Weather phenomenon in the different seasons and the life of living things as a result of research results. (3) In the fourth grade, an attempt was made to make the preparation for education certain, and after the fifth grade, the acquisition characteristic of learning methods in various subjects of observation and experimentation and others were also introduced. With this revision in the scientific areas, the children are encouraged to recognize not only the knowledge on weather phenomenon and living things but also the relationships between the variation of seasons and plants, the behavior of animals as well as the activity of human beings. In these grades the education is aimed at providing the learners with intuitive and intelligible understanding about nature such as the uniformity of living and non-living things.

In this study the authors intended to integrate the fundamental scientific concepts and the process skills from the recent cognitive views. The main points arising from this study are as follows: (1) The declarative knowledge and the procedural knowledge, which are closely related, construct the knowledge system the former functioning as the information which is based on the elements of concepts, and the latter functioning as the rules to apply them at the actual problem solving. (2) The concepts have not only an aspect of words, but also some factors such as images, episodes, intellectual skills, and motor skills, and they can be grasped as assemblage and various linking patterns of these elements. As a result, it is suggested that the fundamental scientific concepts and process skills be integrated into one verbal label that is attached to the concept. (3) Grasping the relevance between the procedural knowledge and the declarative knowledge, we can develop children's cognitive strategies and evaluate their naive ideas in science.

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) is honored as the greatest teacher of science education in the U.S.. He always said: "Go to Nature; take the facts into your own hands; look, and see for yourself!" The method of teaching at the museum is characterized as "educating a naturalist by discovery teaching." On the other hand, the method of the summer school on Penikese Island was "the teaching of natural history" and also "the training of teaching method." We can find the same philosophy between the method at the museum and the method at Penikese. Both teaching methods were initiated with the Agassiz's confidence in human's competence to be able to interact effectively with nature herself. Agassiz never believed that every student was competent to be a researcher of natural history. There were students who failed to find anything at the Agassiz's museum. Agassiz said at Penikese, "It is a false idea to suppose that anybody is competent to learn or to teach everything."

It is important that the teacher have a considerable holding upon the interest and/or the concern which his children have. However, the teacher cannot sometimes take a long time to inquire of his children about their interests. The authors presume that the first question of "the wondering questions in daily life," the children have stand for the whole of their questions ( their interest and/or concerns). (1) The authors have examined the possibility of grasping the interest and/or concerns of the beginners at elementary school by writing for ten minutes. The authors have explained the continuation of wondering consciousness between the beginners at elementary school and the senior pupils at kindergarten by individual interview. The authors have inquired about the wondering consciousness of twenty-eight hundred and fifty-three children attending the three elementary schools which are located on the farms at the border in Toyama city. And then, the authors have classified those data in four spheres (natural phenomena, living things, daily life and articles) by the Shichizo Hori method, and compared the result with those of Hori and the others, and discussed. The decrease of wondering consciousness of children in Nature sphere (Natural field) was remarkable, from the year 1940 to the year 1970. The authors attend to the importance of the first question the children have. The authors examine the relation between the percentages of the whole questions appearing in each sphere and the percentages of the importance of the questions appearing at first in each sphere, and find a good relation between both percentages, except in the case of beginners.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the actual condition of the evaluation process utilized in science education subjects at the elementary school level. The data about the evaluation process analyzed were extracted from practically designed curricula found in the research papers and books published all over Japan. Through this study, the researchers were able to classify the domains and methods of evaluation into some categories. The purpose of analyzing the objectives and the learning activities was to clarify the geometrical structure of the evaluation process with reference to "The Hierarchical Networks of Instructional Units Using ISM (Interpretive Structural Modeling) Method." The results are as follows: (1) The domains and the methods of formative evaluation of scientific knowledge and thinking were evaluated using responses from notebooks as well as actions. Process skills and scientific attitude were evaluated by using notebooks and observation. During the final evaluation, the paper-and-pencil test was commonly used in every domain and essay test for the scientific attitude. (2) The structure of the evaluation process can be classified into 4 types. The structure of the least type represents a tree from consisting of some entrances and one exit. The others were equivalent. An assessment that is done every hour could promote the development in the formative evaluation domains. In the course of the teaching-learning process, the attitude towards nature found at the entrance of the process skills and the logical thinking which develop the scientific knowledge found at the exit were evaluated.

Laboratory tasks in the biology textbooks were analysed to identify their constituent activities and their organization, using the checklist "LAI" developed by the research group of the University of Iowa. General findings were as follows: Students are commonly asked to make observations, manipulate apparatus, and determine the qualitative relationship. On the other hand, they are given few opportunities to formulate questions, to hypothesize and propose tests, or to design an experiment. Students still commonly work as technicians, following the explicit instructions and concentrating on the development of relatively lower level cognitive skills. It is hard to recognize that the students assigned the laboratory tasks are actually enhancing the inquiry objective.

Many students in lower secondary school regard the learning of the electric circuit as memorizing the Ohm's law when they are preparing for an examination to high school. We examined the students' responses for two hours in the learning of the physical meanings among an the electric current, voltage and resistance. We gave them an achievement test after four months and investigated the effect of the class. Our class, consequently, didn't influence the total scholarstic ability. The students, however, understood visually the relation among the current, voltage and resistance, but they could not master the graphic operation in the class. These results suggest that the students will be able to understand the meaning of the principles by using our manner of teaching.

Until now, there have· been many findings on students' processes of thinking in the teaching and learning of science with respect to particular contents of science. But there are only few comprehensive and general investigations of such findings today. This paper examines these findings from various viewpoints, and makes it clear what characteristics and attributes the students' processes of thinking have based on the various previous studies by the author as well as by researchers in foreign countries. As a result, the author clarifies the following nine characteristics and attributes of students' processes of thinking in science: Students' processes of thinking are (1) dependent on their intuition, (2) limiting the focuses of perception, (3) tending to focus on the change of state, (4) linear-causal reasoning, (5) dependent on commonsensical concepts, (6) context-dependent, (7) egocentric, (8) human-centered viewpoints, and (9) animism and emotionalized thinking. Then the author summarizes the following five suggestions for the teaching and learning of science on the basis of these characteristics and attributes of students' processes of thinking in science: (1) conceptions are formed early and students' processes of thinking are influenced by such conceptions, most of which are not nonscientific or prescientific, (2) students attach particular meanings to many technical terms and concepts which are used in science, (3) students' processes of thinking take extremely diverse aspects, ( 4) students' processes of thinking are coherent in their own right even though they are not really correct, and (5) students' processes of thinking which are once formed or acquired are very difficult to change.

"Shizen," an equivalent for "nature" in Japanese science education, has two different types of concept: the scientific one which intends to objectify nature and the inherent one with which Japanese people tend to identify themselves. Japanese Science Education cannot dispense with the latter which has been developed independently of the scientific one. Since Life Environment Study, the newly introduced subject into elementary school, stresses the inherent concept, a certain consideration is necessary for the relationship between Science and Life Environment Study. Only when the two concepts are distinguished from each other, it becomes possible for students to grasp these concepts exactly. Science which intends to teach the scientific concept must be aware of the significance of the inherent one simultaneously; unfortunately, very little attention has been paid to it in Japan. By means of epistemology, the theory of knowledge, an appropriate investigation can be carried out on the relationship between them; an effort at epistemology means that the universality of science is judged from the Japanese inherent view of outer environment. In order to recognize the inherent concept of "shizen," it is helpful to analyze English-translation of "shizen" appearing in literary works originally written in Japanese. An intensive effort to distinguish the inherent concept from the scientific one will develop our view of outer environment: the objective of Science Education. Our result will play a stimulative role in westerner's epistemology because it implies the judgement of the universality of science from the inherent concept of nature, "shizen."

The optional system in the USSR has been gradually expanded since the 1966 reform, which is generally said to have determined the introduction of the present style of the optional studies. Especially in the 1980's, we can observe the following typical changes: the practice of the optional studies at earlier grades; the more diversified courses; the more emphasis on the 'special course'; the systematization of the optional courses; and the resemblance of the optional studies to the 'special school' .We can, therefore, argue that the most salient feature of the present optional system is that it aims to develop and cultivate more positively the individual characteristics of pupils. Such expansion is, in principle, carried out under the condition that absolute emphasis is put on the compulsory courses, and the optional studies still occupy a small part of the whole school curriculum. This combination of the optional and compulsory studies, which seems disproportionate, is intended to give every pupil systematic and firm knowledge of science. As long as the compulsory studies provide the pupils with this scientific knowledge, they are now free to go on to the optional studies and to choose their favorite courses. The expansion of the optional studies, however, has a problematic aspect. First, despite the initial intention to develop the individual abilities and aptitude, the optional studies are actually considered to be merely supplemental to the compulsory studies, and thus the system fails to cater for the individualistic education. Secondly, since the optional studies are not obligatory to pupils, there seem to be not many who are exploiting this system. These problems indicate that the success of the optional system depends on the adequate combination of the compulsory and optional studies, and, more importantly, it depends on how to make the pupils involved in the optional studies: for example, in the first stage, they either utterly deny the optional studies or not, and in the second stage, if they decide to participate in these studies, the pupils can make free choice of the courses or the choices are controlled by the teachers.

The former studies have referred to the viewpoint how Japan, which was backward in modernization, has accepted and developed the superior Western ideas and practices of science experiment in the Meiji and Taisho eras. But for the future it is necessary that the development of it in Japan is relatively located in the history of the development of it in the world. From such a critical mind the purpose of this study is to take up the case study of Germany from among the West and to seize the development of pupil's experiment of physics in secondary school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to this, the findings of this study are as follows: (1) It is conjectured that in the year 1898 at least 19 schools did the pupil's experiment of physics in Germany. In the year 1904/05 31 schools and in the year 1913 at least 223 schools did it. In the year 1905/06 there were 30 schools and in the year 1909 there were 141 schools inPrussia, a country of Germany. It is considered that there were the Meran's proposition (Die Meraner Vorschliige) in the year 1905 and the financial assistance by the Prussian Government starting in the year 1906. (2) In almost all the secondary schools pupil's experiment was done in the three school years from OI to 0II and in 1-2 hours a week. For the first time the pupil's experiment was done by an elective system, but thereafter it was done gradually by a compulsory system. (3) In the year 1898 the number of the participants of the pupil's experiment at a school was 10-20 boys, but in the year 1905/06 they were 5-165 boys. The spread between the maximum number of them and the minimum number of them became wide. (4) The number of the schools which did the pupil's experiment of physics existed abundantly in the order of Oberrealschule, Realgymnasium and Gymnasium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.