To make students understand science rules successfully, it seems crucial to plan a teaching-learning design based on the following requisites: (1) The teacher should focus on teaching the most fundamental rules of science: (2) The teacher should classify the meaning of terms and the experiences supporting the required manipulation of terms from two points of view, that of everyday life and that of science: (3) Suitable contents of terms manipulation should be selected with care in order to enable students to understand the rules concerned: (4) At the start of the teaching-learning procedure, the teacher should arrange for students to have experiences extending from everyday life, and make them construct a clear relation of concepts through logical or illogical term-manipulation, that should be supported by experiences derived from the viewpoint of science. Results gained through constructive research trying to construct teaching-learning materials and to verify their adequacy through actual classroom activity emphatically suggest that the structure in (1) - (4) enables students to understand science rules successfully.

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A number of 119 undergraduate students were given two texts, and, after reading them were asked questions evaluating their understanding and interrelating. The two texts were about the degree of gas dissolution in water and ocean currents. Half of the subjects were presented with versions of the texts in which the information had been related, while the remaining half had versions in which the information had not been related. The results indicated that externally related information did not have any effect on problem solving whereas interrelating by the subjects did. The results also suggested that some inner factors might be involved in interrelating knowledge. The 2nd study tested the reliability of the Cognitive Activeness Scale, which was intended to measure the learners' tendency towards passive processing of the information, and examined whether learners' passiveness hampered interrelating and problem solving. The relation between the score on the CA Scale and the interrelating results was examined for a group of 82 undergraduate students who had participated in the 1st experiment. The analysis revealed that the more passive learners failed to relate the information in the two texts and to solve the applied questions. This suggests that the learners' cognitive activeness tends to affect the their learning capability.

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[in Japanese]

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