When students' ideas of a water solution are examined, they seem to consist of a large amount of everyday experience-based ideas and a small amount of scientific understanding. This study aims to clarify the factors that may influence the integration of everyday ideas and scientific understanding as students try to construct their ideas of a given solution in a science class. For this purpose, a teaching plan in which Grade 6 elementary school students are asked to classify unknown solutions was prepared. To determine the students' ideas of a solution before and after the science class, they were asked to make a concept map based on a given key word. According to their concept maps, they were then divided into two groups: the integrated map group and the non-integrated map group. Each group performed the activities, and they were observed especially during their discussions when the group had to classify the solutions. The discussions that took place in each group were classified into four types: repetition, making sense, questions, and other chat. Analysis of the data seems to show that there were more repetitions in the conversations of the integrated map group, suggesting that repetition may be an important factor in the integration of everyday ideas and scientific understanding.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the structure of self-efficacy in junior and senior high school science education. In order to analyze the relation between the learner's self-efficacy, learning strategies, and the results of their study at the learning scene of science, the researcher developed the Learning Strategies Scale for Science Education (LSSSE), a simplified version of the Self-Efficacy Scale for Science Education (SESSE-S), an improved version of the Metacognition Scale of Cognitive Strategies (MSCS Ver. 2) , and the Relatedness Scale to the Circumference at Learning Scene (RSCL). These four scales were used in a research project involving 547 junior and senior high school students. The findings of this research are as follows: 1. "Elaboration strategies" and "organizational strategies" correlate closely with control and agency beliefs for effort and ability, which are important concepts of self-efficacy, and with "self-appraisal" and "self-management" of the metacognitive strategies. Consequently, the learning strategy can be regarded as an important concept of self-efficacy in science learning. 2. "Expectations by others" of relatedness to the circumference at the learning scene correlates with control and agency beliefs for effort. Moreover, agency beliefs for the teacher correlate with every component of self-efficacy. 3. Students who get high grades in science appear to have a great ability in agency beliefs for effort, self-management in the "planning of the problem solution" and "processing of information on the problem solution." They also seem to have a high ability in "elaboration strategies" for learning and "organizational strategies." These findings suggest some new possibilities for improving learners' self-efficacy.

In recent years the importance of education treating environmental problems has been emphasized. An understanding of acid rain comes not only from its pH value but also from the total amount of pollutant ions it contains. Thus it is very important to evaluate the total ion concentration in each rainwater sample. However, a very expensive instrument such as an ion chromatograph has to be used to measure the precise concentrations of ions in the rainwater samples. Such an instrument cannot be used at secondary schools. Recently, however, compact, inexpensive, and easy-to-use pH meters and electric conductivity (EC) meters have been distributed in these schools. The EC of a solution can be used to give a measure of the total ion concentration of the solution because the measures of the EC and the ion concentration are proportional as long as the pH of the solution is not very low. But the conductivity of the hydrogen ion has a very large value in comparison to that of the other ions, and the physical image of the unit of EC, μS cm^-1, is rather difficult for secondary school students to grasp. In this study, rainwater samples were collected, and their ionic compositions were analyzed by using ion chromatography. We have come to the conclusion that the total ion concentration in a rainwater sample can be evaluated by using the values of the pH and the EC based on the following equation: C^Total = 10^-pH + (EC x 10^-3 － 349.81 x 10^-pH)/67.7 And, when the pH is larger than 4.5, the formula becomes much simpler: C^Total = EC x 10^-3/67.7 (in equiv L^-1 unit)

This study analyzes students' understanding of electric current and tries to examine how to develop it. A simple electric circuit is chosen for observation, consisting of a dry cell battery and a miniature light bulb or a miniature motor. To describe the experimental result, a "particle model" and an "arrow model" are introduced at the beginning. As a result, children are dissatisfied with their drawing because the current is constant before and after passing through the bulb, which seems to disagrees with their daily experience that batteries are depleted as used. Then children find problems with the given descriptive models and design their own model, which turns out to be effective in that it accounts for the apparent contradiction they encountered.

Taking into account Bakhtin' s idea of "social language," it would seem that the student's approach to science in the classroom is not restricted by frameworks such as scientific concepts or their own ideas of science. In other words, "social language" is a consensus reached through inter-subjectivity. On the other hand, the socio-cultural approach refers to the student's learning as "identity formation." The student experiences a crisis of identity in social surroundings, even in the science classroom where he or she has an experience of differentiation from the others. The purpose of this study is to provide a concrete example of these concepts. We examined students' learning along with the classroom consensus called "social language." As a result of this examination, we refer to two aspects of "social language" formation in the science classroom. First, children inquire into metaphorical representations through inter-subjectivity, because metaphorical representations are sense-centered and need to be given specific contexts and meanings. Second, children specify contexts where words are used, because cross contexts cause different meanings when the same word is used. Through inter-subjectivity, we can refer learning as "identity formation". Both of these approaches are a great help to joint attention and form the "social language" in the science classroom.