The experiments on plant responses to environmental changes are not familiar in Japanese high schools, because of the absence of good teaching materials. We developed a student experiment to learn the elongating effect of gibberellic acid (GA) from the well-known phenomenon that the elongation of seedlings stops as soon as they are exposed to the sunlight. The first day, students were required to put spinach (Spinacia oleracea) seeds without fruit walls, immersed in water overnight, on vermiculite either included water (control group) or 0.3 × 10⁻⁶ M uniconazole (an inhibitor of GA biosynthesis, treated group). After dividing each group into two parts, the students incubated two sets which consist of two parts from each group in the light or in the dark condition, respectively. After 5-days-incubation, the students measured the hypocotyl length, and found that the hypocotyl length in the dark was approximately 150% longer than that in the light. They also found that in the dark the inhibitor uniconazole reduced the hypocotyl length by approximately 40%, in other words, nearly to the length in the light condition. We carried out the pre- and post-test of three problems of the four- or five-party alternative. The practice increased the percentages of the students, who chose the correct alternative in the problems on the enhancement of hypocotyl elongation and the increase of the GA biosynthesis in the dark, from 11 to 88 and 85, respectively. That is, our practice was shown to be highly effective to improve the students’ understanding on the environmental responses appeared upon the plant growth and morphology by means of GA.

The main purposes of this study are to examine whether preservice elementary school teachers have the scientific knowledges of the bones of the arm.

The main findings of this study were as follows; 1) about 3.3% of the teachers had scientifically recognized the bones of the arm; 2) the preservice teachers had several misconceptions related to the bones of the arm and 3) about 74% of the teachers recognized the joint as one bone.