Japanese Journal of Biological Education

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Although the science field of the course of study in Japan requires all the fifth graders to study the diet of medaka fish, students may be unable to realize that they actually eat small organisms living in rivers and ponds. The reason we assume this is that most of the science textbooks does not introduce a direct method to observe their diet. Stomach-pump method, which allows the observation of food organism in fish body without killing them (Koya et al. 2012), can help students realize it, but teachers may be reluctant to introduce it into their class because it requires some delicate operations. To solve this, we developed a video material to show the procedures of this method and examined its effectiveness with 47 fifth graders. An analysis on their worksheets and post-hoc questionnaires suggests that the material can give students a clearer image of medaka’s feeding ― they eat small organisms living in water.

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