This study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of introducing the particle model into the teaching of the fourth grade material, “the temperature and volume of things” through observation of the movement of a styrene foam ball and the use of a microwave for the students’ accurate understanding of thermal expansion.

The result indicated that students’ misconception in the control group was not corrected after conducting experiments with “water”, “air”, and “metal”. More than 80% of the students in the experimental group, however, who learned the particle model through observation of the movement of a styrene foam ball and the use of a microwave, comprehended thermal expansion correctly after an experiment with “water”. They also applied this way of thinking to the study of “air” and “metal”, resulting in correct answers in a test of the particle concept.

The results of this study show that the particle model is comprehensible for elementary school students. It is thus demonstrated that teaching which introduces the particle model through observation of the movement of a styrene foam ball and the use of a microwave is effective for elementary school students’ understanding of the relationship between temperature and volume.

In this paper, I developed teaching materials and lesson programs that use them in each of the processes of scientific reasoning emphasized by the new curriculum guidelines, such as setting tasks, drafting experimental plans, and considering focus on experimental results. The purpose of this paper is to practice the lesson program with students, evaluate the adequacy of the program from students’ activities and worksheet descriptions, and to evaluate whether students’ first-year courses that have introduced the program improved students’ scientific reasoning skills. By evaluating the descriptions in the worksheets, it was found that the developed lesson programs can be seen to confirm an achievement of each process of students’ scientific reasoning skills. Furthermore, I was able to confirm the improvement of university students’ scientific reasoning skills by CTSR and statistical analysis.

In this genome age, citizens need to correctly understand personal genome based on the concepts of dominance and recessiveness; however, it has been reported that most university students understand it inaccurately. Replacement of the relevant terms by alternatives was proposed by the Genetics Society of Japan in 2017 to reduce conceptual misunderstanding. However, the level of such misunderstanding among junior high school students after their introduction to Mendelian genetics is not known. We developed a questionnaire to assess misconceptions regarding dominance and conducted a large-scale survey (n=1004) to assess junior high school students’ comprehension of dominance. We reached three important conclusions from the findings: 1) About 90% of students thought dominant traits to be advantageous for survival and that the most frequent traits in a population result from dominant alleles. 2) The erroneous association of dominance with trait frequency was stronger than the incorrect association of dominance with fitness. 3) Replacing the terms dominance and recessiveness may address student confusion of the ideas of dominance with fitness but may actually increase misconceptions associating dominance with trait frequency. Further studies are needed to reveal the mechanisms underlying these misconceptions before the terms are replaced.

The division of science and humanities sometimes generates conflicts in our community. To identify a possible gap between the two areas, I conducted research to elucidate how university students define science and humanities. Forty-two undergraduate/graduate students were administered a semi-structured interview, and the collected data were analyzed by qualitative data analysis software. The analysis discovered 7 distinct categories that divided science and humanities: “target of interest”, “skill”, “nature of knowledge production”, “direction of knowledge production”, “process of thinking”, “starting point of thinking”, and “end point of thinking.” “Process of thinking” was the most popular category; however, considerable diversity existed among students’ views. These categorizations also suggested their non-negligible association with ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies adopted in academic disciplines. Further analysis revealed that science was associated with positivism, monism, empiricism, and rationalism, whereas the humanities were linked to interpretivism and pluralism.