Collection of the fruit fly, Drosophila, was conducted at Yashiro town in Hyogo prefecture from October 1986 to September 1987 at 2 week intervals. The collection results suggest that the collection procedure itself reported here will make a suitable teaching material in upper secondary school biology classes. The reasons are as follows:

(1) Different species were collected in different environments. For example, D. melanogaster was collected in Yashiro town, D. auraria was collected along the Chugoku highway and D. bizonata was collected at Mt. Mikusa,

(2) Different seasonal changes were observed in different species. For example, D. melanogaster increased in autumn, D. auraria and D. bizonata increased from early summer to autumn.

(3) The correlation between the number and temperature for each species was observed.

Our society is facing a ‘Crisis in Science Education’. It is the purpose of this study to find a way out of this crisis in elementary school science. In order to achieve this aim, we first clarified the method by surveying the “Science for Life and Living” (SL&L) program developed by BSCS. This SL&L program is based on STS education and focuses on health. It was clarified that the basic themes of SL&L are science as a way of knowing, technology as a way of being, and health as a way of doing. The SL&L program included the Constructivist Learning Model as a teaching method advocated by Bybee et al. and the Cooperative Learning as a teaching style developed by Johnson et al. SL&L developed the portfolio assessment point of view as an authentic evaluation tool.

Second, in elementary school we have the revised Science Course of Study, one kind of national standard curriculum which focuses on aspects of human biology effective from the school year 1991–92. At the elementary level based on STS education we will try to expand and develop the human and health aspects which were clarified based on the features of the SL&L program developed by BSCS. This new elementary school science is expected to achieve a breakthrough in the ‘Crisis in Science Education’ at the elementary level.

This study was intended to confirm by means of a questionnaire how the plant cultivation as a part of “life” education influenced the educational activities of kindergarten teachers. Kaiware-daikon, the seedling stage of the radish, was used as a teaching material for the “life” education. Subjects of the questionnaire were kindergarten teachers: twenty-eight of them had experienced plant cultivation at school; thirty had also experienced it, not at school, but in the in-service training; and twenty-seven had not experienced it at all.

The results obtained from the questionnaire indicate that 1) the experience of plant cultivation at school or in the in-service training has the effect of motivating kindergarten teachers to introduce it into their education activities; 2) as teaching materials, flowering plants have frequently been used in nursery school activity, but new teaching materials such as Kaiware-daikon should be explored.

It is necessary for teachers to know children’s cognition of life and death before they introduce some topics concerning bio-ethics into biology education at schools. We made a questionnaire for elementary school pupils to know their experience of breeding and their cognition of life and death.

About 90% of the respondents had experienced breeding and gave some responses such as burying the carcass when the raised animal had died. 70% of the respondents believed in the presence of soul or spirit. In case of human beings, however, the connection between life and death and soul seemed to be weak in most of the respondents because they thought the death of a human being should be expressed as heart death or brain death. In addition, some differences in the cognition of life were observed between the male and female respondents.

Recent cognitive psychology has clarified that our knowledge and abilities are extremely related to each situation, and the application range is narrow. In general, this phenomenon is called context dependency, domain specificity.

In the present study, we attempted to clarify the existence of this context dependency of knowledge and how it changes according to the grade level of the children. Two sets of questions were made. All questions concerned sex cognition. One set of questions concerned the case of humans (human context) and the other one concerned the case of animals (animal context). Both sets were composed of four questions: the first one related to sex difference, the second one related to reasons for the existence of sex, the third one related to a mechanism for birth, and the fourth one related to the hereditary relationship to the father.

The results are the following three points: (1) the answers of many children depend on the context; (2) the child’s context dependency decreases the higher the grade level of the child; (3) children have a different characteristic understanding of sex in each context (human, animal). Depending on the question, between 30% to 70% of the fifth grade children showed some degree of context dependency although the content of animals is directly compared with that of humans in the present fifth grade curriculum. This indicates that the children’s context dependency is considerably strong.

Teaching materials for environmental education were developed. The growth of rice plants was inhibited when they were cultivated in solutions of copper sulfate of 3. 2 ppm, 10 ppm and 32 ppm, and also in solutions of cobalt chloride of 10 ppm and 32 ppm. The rate of inhibition of the growth of rice plants was proportional to the concentration of the copper sulfate and cobalt chloride.

The growth of duckweed was inhibited by a 10 yen coin. After 5 days culture, the inhibition was observed for the first time in both Lemna paucicostata and Spirodela polyrhiza. All Lemna were dead after 7 days culture and all Spirodela were dead after 10 days culture. The influences of copper, zinc and tin, which are all components of a 10 yen coin, on the growth of Spirodela were examined separately. The growth of the plant was inhibited by copper and zinc, but not by tin. However, it was not clear from the results of this study which metal was stronger in inhibiting the growth of duckweed.