This study is an attempt to analyze the “logic of composition of teaching materials” using Toulmin’s argument model for elementary school science textbooks. For three typical textbooks currently in use, descriptions that lead to conclusions from the data were extracted. As a result, a total of 198 arguments were identified. Of these, only 19 arguments (9.6%) were accompanied by warrants, and for most arguments, the warrants were hidden. The leap from data to conclusion was categorized into three categories: “generalization to higher categories”, “divergence between phenomenon and interpretation”, and “divergence between models and real objects”. These results suggest that there are certain flaws in the logic of the textbooks, and that if learners cannot fill the leap, they are likely to fail learning. It was also argued that simply “restoring” the hidden warrants would result in a paradox of question-begging in which the content to be learned in the future becomes the warrant for the current argument. Furthermore, several measures were proposed to increase the reliability of the argument while avoiding the paradox.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the actual state of history learning of university students and to examine whether teaching activities aimed at interrelating knowledge promote their inference of historical events. For this purpose, we used the “Columbus problem” that asked the location of the West Indies where Columbus had arrived in 1492 and that can be solved by associating knowledge about Columbus (e.g., the destination, route direction, discovery place). The pre-test showed that not a few students placed the West Indies in the vicinity of India, and their answers were inconsistent with their knowledge. It suggested their knowledge was isolated and individual. Then we conducted the teaching activities in which we interrelated their factual knowledge to the background knowledge of the historical event. As a result, 73% of the students were able to identify the places of the West Indies correctly. The teaching activity had positive effects on their inference. But some students still identified them incorrectly. Future research needs to investigate how we could encourage students to interrelate knowledge appropriately.

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[in Japanese]

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