The purpose of this study is to clarify the actual conditions and the structure of motivations for academic achievement in science education of the elementary and secondary education. Observation and experiments in science class have been regarded as the essentials to heighten motivations for academic achievement, but I wonder how far they can heighten it and what influence they have upon the various constituents of it. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of observation and experiments. The findings of this study are as follows: (1) Observation and experiments in science education are effective to heighten motivation for academic achievement because they heighten a part of the constituents of motivations for academic achievement, but these methods have hitherto been able to heighten only a few constituents, so it is clarified that observation and experiments do not necessarily heighten the whole constituents of it. (2) “Dry laboratories,” which involve operational processes such as work study, is often more effective to heighten motivations for academic achievement than direct experiences such as observation and experiments. “Dry laboratories” will also be effective to heighten aspects of cognitive recognition like knowledge, understanding and so on. (3) “Dry laboratories” carried out in advance of observation and experiments have an effect upon many constituents of motivations for academic achievement. The relevant constituents are as follows: self-evaluation. originality, planning, particularity, responsibility, continuance, judgment, accuracy, level of aspiration, achievement motive. Therefore, making use of “dry laboratories” as well as observation and experiments is effective to heighten motivations for academic achievement.

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to examine the reliability and validity of our questionnaires about materials of living things and (2) to scrutinize the relationship between the students' interest in these materials and their achievement motive. The results showed (1) that there was the high reliability of the questionnaires about animal and botanical materials; (2) that there was some developmental and sexual differences in the correlation between the students’ interest in these materials and their achievement motive. Finally, an evaluation process of students' interest in science class was discussed.

The authors demonstrated three examples of collision of two balls to fourth, fifth and sixth graders at elementary school. Children were then asked to write down their conception of the collisions. At least one of the examples was so selected as to be inconsistent with their preconception about collision. On the basis of the children’s description, we classified their conceptual changes into eight types, including “Creation,” “Replacement,” “Extension,” “Modification,” “Unification,” “Persistency,” “Decrease” and “No Reason,” The findings from this project were as follows: (1) Five of the conceptual change types i.e., “Creation,” “Replacement,” “Extension,” “Modification” and “Unification,”, which can be regarded as giving “positive educational effects” account for about 70% of the descriptions. Accordingly, we claim the children can study aggressively by themselves. (2) The higher graders the children become the more based on their preconception they study. (3) The sequence of the children’s conceptual change through counterexample demonstration is: “Creation” → “Persistency” → “Replacement” → “Extension” and “Modification” → “Unification.” This sequence seems to reflect the process of children’s conception formation. However, some children seem to have “ad-hoc” conceptions or “firm” preconceptions. Therefore, further studies on emotional and meta-cognitive aspect would be required for confirming the above findings.

Warwick Process Science (WPS) is a science curriculum for the secondary schools in U.K. developed in 1989 by the project founded in 1986 at the University of Warwick to improve the traditional science in the country. The present authors intended to clarify the philosophies underlying the curriculum, and its contents, teaching mehtods and assessment systems in relation to the newly enacted National Curriculum of U.K. in order to get some useful information for Japanese science education. The main results we found are as follows: (1) The general purpose of WPS is to get students to acquire “Problem Solving Abilities” by starting with learning six foundamental processes (observing, inferring, classifying, predicting, controlling variables, hypothesizing), then proceeding step by step through learning intermediate integrated processes to learning the final complicated stage. (2) “Inferring” is given the highest priority among the six processes, so that many activities in WPS are organized in the format of testing the students’ own inferences. (3) WPS emphasizes the formative evaluation and adopts the criterion-referenced evaluation as an assessment system, which is consistent with the National Curriculum. (4) The curriculum composed of many modules, each of which includes practical activities related to every day life, social industrial technical lives. It has adopted what has recently been called STS. (5) The organization of each module is broad and balanced in contents, context, and processes, so that any secondary school science teacher can select and use them by according to his own preference.

Although it has been said that the purpose of science education itself prescribes the contents and methods of education in a practical manner, it has not been made completely clear up until now what kind of mechanism or process there is to do so. The pupose of this study is to clarify what kind of connection there is between the teaching-learning theory and the purpose of science education. The author investigates the above-mentioned problem based on various observations of childrens’ scientific concept formation and understanding which form the basis of the teaching-learning theory. The clarification of the relation between some concrete educational contents and their educational purpose/objective is an inevitable discussion, when one considers how specific contents will in fact affect children’s future. In addition, recent studies of children’s scientific concept formation and understanding, which is a prerequisite for the discussion of the purpose of science education, have shown more revealing and clearer pictures of the issue at stake than before. Thus, it is absolutely necessary to reconsider the purpose of science education now. This paper discusses the results of those studies and the teaching-learning theory that has stemmed from the above-mentioned studies. After these disscussions, this paper proposes that it is necessary that each child develops his/her own scientific view of nature as well as that of the world that is appropriate for each individual situation.

Recent science education researches have uncovered and positively recognized children’s own ideas. Such ideas are composed of various knowledge styles cultivated in their own everyday life. Thus, science teachers are urged to change their teaching strategies, and reflect what kinds of roles they should take in science teaching. As a result of clarifying these problems, the followings were obtained: (1) When school knowledge and the everyday knowledge were fused in science teaching, children’s autonomous learning appeared. (2) Children’s autonomous learning were facilitated by their interests and conceptions. (3) Autonomous learning needed the teaching strategies that were constructed by the affordance children had. (4) Consequently, children constructed the scientific concepts by using some styles of knowledges that were enriched by their own “images” “episodes” and so on.