The objective of this research is to formulate and practice an elementary school science class with an aim to nurture children’s sensitivity, and to verify the effectiveness of the lesson. As a research method, we evaluated the actual situation of children so far and then carried out class practice. From the questionnaire survey, the nature experience and play experience of children became clear. In particular, with reference to the items of “I have played with toys using batteries” and “I have played with toys using magnets” in association with the contents of the “function of electric current” that is the target of class practice in this research, more than 50% of the children replied, “I have had some experience” or “I have had a lot of experience”. On the other hand, 3.2% or 9.7% of children replied, “I have had no experience at all” or “I have not had much experience”, respectively. Based on these actual situations of children, we constructed a concept for a science class to nurture children’s sensitivity. The lesson features two points: One is to set up a place where all children can create an experience in which an electromagnet attracts iron. This is done in the introduction phase to equalize the differences in children’s experience of play so far. The other is that, in the process of solving problems afterwards, instructors should repeatedly implying that the children’s sensitivity is valued. From the analysis of the practiced lessons, it was clarified that children could improve their prospects of solving problems with the repeated support of instructors who valued their sensitivity and were able to reach “ understanding with real feeling”. Through this class practice, we gained the knowledge that instructors were able to nurture children’s sensitivity by repeatedly implicating or valuing their sensitivity.

According to the PISA 2015 international investigation, Japanese students feel the fun of science less than other countries’ students and have lower motivation for learning science.

From the course of study in upper secondary school, it is shown that teachers should emphasize the learning contents which depend on performing more positively in experiments and observations with regard to the contents of the up-to-date technology.

Therefore we carried out the DNA experiments and the Central-Dogma reproduction experiment to learn the content of the advanced science in cooperation with a university.

Our analysis of the questionnaires and students’ reports revealed that the students felt fun for science with both experiments and it seemed that there were effective measures for prod students’ interest for science.

In addition, it was suggested that the DNA experiments were effective in leading to course study and career education. And also it was suggested that the Central-Dogma reproduction experiment was more effective for 1^st grade upper secondary school students who, unlike their elders, haven’t selected their subject course yet. These considerations were up from the different way of how to do these experiments.

This analysis was conducted on 29 secondary school science lessons which were videotaped in Hiroshima prefecture. The study focused on interactions between teacher and students; their interactions were analyzed with respect to Initiation-Response- Feedback/follow up (IRF) structure (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975) and Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) structure (Mehan, 1979). Through this analysis, it was revealed that the frequency with which the IRF structure was used amounted to more than twice as many as the frequency of the IRE structure. The teachers didn’t give any immediate evaluations, whether or not the students’ responses were correct. The teachers seemed to try to deepen the reasoning of whole class by asking a question. The IRE structure was more frequently seen in the classes which relied on the lecture format; on the other hand, the IRF structure was more frequently seen in the classes that centered on experimentation and/or observation.The questions that teachers asked in the lessons were also analyzed with a revision of Blooms’ Taxonomy (Anderson, L.W. and Krathwohl, D.R., 2001), which consisted of 6 dimensions “remembering”, “understanding”, “applying”, “analyzing”, “evaluating” and “creating”.

With consideration of Anderson and Krathwohl’s framework, the results revealed that, “applying” , “analyzing” and “creating”, which could be regarded as high rank questions, were frequently observed in the lessons in which an experiment or an observation were mainly conducted.Those high ranked questions were also observed in the lessons in which the main contents were discussing the result of the experiment and the conclusion. The question which was regarded as “creating” and was the highest ranking in a revision of Blooms’ Taxonomy was especially noted at the introduction of the experiment.

The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of a devised teaching model which aims to foster the experimental design skills of elementary school science students. The teaching model consists of 8 steps: 1) teaching what hypothesis is, 2) teaching a method for forming and verifying hypothesis via the connection of words, 3) teaching a watchword and planning the experiment in detail to verify the hypothesis, 4) cross-validating among students based on the watchword, 5) confirmation of the plan for the experiment by the teacher, 6) conducting the experiment, 7) reflecting upon the experiment, and 8) sharing the results and drawing conclusions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching model, a unit of the nature of aqueous solution was taught to two classes of sixth-grade elementary school students. From the results, it was revealed that the devised teaching model was found to foster students’ experimental design skills.

Exposing students to events in which they can find questions is important in nurturing their critical/creative thinking skills and ability to solve problems. Therefore, we aimed to examine whether engaging students in free trial activities in the introduction of a study unit would develop students’ ability to find questions and identify problems to solve. In order to encourage students in critical/creative thinking (divergent and convergent thinking), we used sticky notes for students to write their notes, and the “KJ method” by which students to build their own typology of their observations. As the results of experiment in a fifth-grade class of an elementary school, this teaching method was demonstrated to be effective in developing students’ ability to find questions and identify problems to solve.

An orogenic movement model was developed as a teaching material according to the local education condition to promote disaster prevention education in Nepal, where a huge earthquake occurred in April 2015. In order to evaluate the educational efficacy of the lesson, three trial lessons were carried out for junior high students, high school students, and university students. A worksheet for all students, and a questionnaire after several weeks for only the high school students, were used as methods of evaluation. Previously, most of the Nepalese students did not know the formation mechanism of the Himalayan Mountains and the movement of the Indian continent. Many ammonite fossils collected on Mount Everest, Nepal were sold as souvenirs downtown, but most students had never seen them. Many students had good impressions about the activity, which included an experiment and pictures. The orogenic movement model and the lesson style encouraged students’ understanding of the Himalayan range formation and elevated the students’ interest of the Himalaya Mountains and Mount Everest.

This study explores the quantitative trends of graphs and the instructions of construction and interpretation of graphs in elementary and lower-secondary school science textbooks. Utilizing content analysis that focused on the elements of a graph, twenty-four elementary textbooks and fifteen lower-secondary textbooks in Japan were examined. The findings of our examination of the topic Graphs and Graphing in science textbooks in Japan revealed the following trends: First, the average and total number of graphs in the science textbooks of lower-secondary schools were larger in number than the number of graphs in the textbooks of elementary schools. Second, following the transition from elementary schools to lower-secondary schools, the proportions of the type of graphs and variables were found to be different. While the proportions of line graphs and bar graphs were observed to be decreasing in the school-level transition, the proportions of curve graphs and straight-line graph were seen to be increasing. Third, most graphs in the elementary science textbooks generally included all the basic elements of a graph (plots, axis, unit of variable, and scale). On the other hand, in addition to the full-element graphs, more abstract graphs that showed only the trend of change without identifying concrete numerical values were also found in lower-secondary science textbooks. Fourth, based on the case study on the selected Japanese textbooks, the textbook descriptions of instruction for graphs in the textbooks emphasized only some specific parts of graphing such as aims of graphing, key procedures for constructing line graphs, and errors of measurement. Other aspects of graphing were not mentioned explicitly, including selection of the graph types, ways to interpret the graphs, explanation of dependent and independent variables, mathematical formulation of approximate lines. Implications from the study suggest the importance of learning the nature of variables and the selection of graph, and treating the procedural knowledge and epistemological knowledge of graphs and graphing together.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the improvement of classroom activities in science lessons by comparing the activities of scientists in inquiries with that of learners in the classroom.

The results of the study clarify that the learners should get an overview on a system of theories as a conceptual framework before learning. The system of theories makes it easier to understand the meaning of hypotheses and the methods of observations/experiments in the textbook; students are then able to make predictions and to use selective attention to record and evaluate the observed facts. More importantly, the observed facts are interpreted in the context of this system of theories, known as the hermeneutic circle, in the discussion of the results of observations and/or experiments. We cannot understand the observed facts appropriately without this theoretical context.

The proposals for the teaching methodologies are shown. One is to revise textbooks to show the system of theories for significant and meaningful observations and/or experiments before carrying them out. The other is to read “results”, “discussion” and “conclusion” in the textbook before conducting observations and/or experiments. An outcome of the lesson appears as the difference in students’ depth of understanding of these readings before and after their observations and experiments.

This research aimed at clarifying the construction process of the self-concept via children’s autonomous study. The teacher carried out feedback at the task level, the process level, the self-integration level, and the self-level, which are feedback-functions as teaching movements. While encouraging children’s science concept construction, I undertook to also encourage children’s expression to value attachment and internalization of feedback-function. When the actual condition that the child is self-consciously constructing four levels had been achieved, I carried out fading and encouraged their self-conscious drive. After the production of a conceptual scaffold was completed, the children’s motivation to study was raised, and they internalized addressed feedback gradually, making the addressed feedback of the process level and the self-integration level drive self-consciously from a task level. As a result, the children were better equipped to autonomously tackle problem solving, and built upon their self-concepts in connection with an understanding of a science concept. That is, the self-conscious drive of addressed feedback embodied autonomous study, and was revealed to have clearly contributed to students’ construction of the self-concept in conjunction with a science concept.

In the industrial (especially, manufacturing) world, IE (Industrial Engineering) is popular as one of several rationalization methods. IE is used for analyzing and improving present works from the viewpoint of time. In the educational world, the learning style has been shifting from ‘passive learning’ to ‘active learning’. Meanwhile, few researchers discuss the improvement of lesson design and teaching methodology scientifically from a time perspective. In this study, a group experiment on heat quantity has been practiced for verification, followed by analyzing students’ motions based on IE thinking. The results show that the value-added work time accounts for less than 60% of the lesson time, and reveal. that the shorter the value-added work time, the worse the level of student’s understanding. Moreover, we have faced ironic situations in which some groups who get their work done smoothly under close cooperation are liable to be left with too much waiting time. Thus, some points to be improved have been uncovered by analyzing the current lesson. This study demonstrates a need for IE thinking in subject education.

When solving a physics problem, incorporating established conditions into one drawing rich in readability (physical description) is required as an effective approach. It is indisputable that the physical description should be done with the essential understanding of the physical phenomenon under consideration. In order to help students establish essential understanding of the physical phenomenon, demonstrations or experiments are useful. However, among physical phenomena dealt with under physics education, there are various difficult-to-observe phenomena, which make the demonstrations or experiments difficult to conduct. Consequently, this leads to affecting the physical description and subsequent thinking in the process of solving the physics problem. In this study, after teaching a lesson involving vibrations of a string and an air-column in an extremely common way, students’ answering behaviors on relevant wave problems were analyzed. The results showed that the number of the students who give physical descriptions for the air-column problems were fewer than those who did so for the string problems. Furthermore, even when solving the air-column problems by utilizing the physical descriptions and calculations, many students make mistakes at the physical description stage. These results indicate that the risk of stumbling over the physical descriptions increases when students cannot observe the physical phenomenon itself sufficiently.

The purpose of this research is to make it clear that “recognition of the significance ofscience learning” has various influences on “motivation” by separating motivation from self-determination. First, a questionnaire on recognition and motivation of the significance of science learning was devised. Second, an investigation was conducted by means of these questionnaires targeting high school students, and covariance structural analysis of the survey results revealed what kind of influence recognition of the significance of science learning has on motivation. The results showed: (1) when the learner thinks that the significant aspect of science learning is “scientific ability” it has a positive influence on “identified regulation” and it has a negative influence on “external motivation,” (2) when the learner attaches higher significance to “relation with daily life” it has a positive influence on “intrinsic motivation,” “identified regulation” and “introjected regulation”.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between diagram-drawing skills in the field of physics and mental imagery ability and to examine the effective learning strategies for students who are not good at mental imagery processing to acquire high drawing skills. The participants were first grade upper secondary school students (n=80). Results of the analysis showed that the spatial controllability of mental imagery had a significant effect on both diagram-drawing skills, “visualization” (a process of drawing physical phenomena from sentence information) and “physics description” (a process of drawing physical information such as vector information and numerical information). In addition, it was revealed that visualization skills tended to be higher when a linguistic encoding strategy was used in the group with low spatial controllability, and the physics depiction skill tended to be higher for the students who used an organizational strategy. In conclusion, mental imagery ability is a variable that explains the individual differences in the diagram-drawing skills. However, even if the students are not good at spatial controllability of the mental imagery, diagram-drawing skills can be fostered by adaptive learning strategies.

In this investigation, a lesson on universal gravitation in high school was designed and implemented based on an analysis of learners’ negative impressions toward this field of study (negative feelings), and its effects were examined. According to an ex-ante conscious survey, it was found that about 25% of the students did not have any interest in this field. It was also found that many of them had negative feelings due to the expectation that it is hard to image the state or the motion in the universe, whether or not they had any prior interest in this field. Moreover, in the group without any interest in this field, another negative feeling, that it is hard to feel a close connection to this field, was found to be common. Judging from these results, a lesson featuring the total lunar eclipse was designed and implemented with consideration of various negative feelings, especially regarding those in the group without interest in the field. Firstly, the students measured gravitational acceleration via simple experiments using familiar tools, and then they calculated the rough distance to the moon, applying the experimental results and information from a video of the total lunar eclipse. During the instruction, subjective, interactive, and deep group activities were observed, and, consequently, over 90% of the students felt that their negative feelings would be improved under lessons like this. This investigation reveals a beneficial impact of the instructional design based on an analysis of learners’ feelings on a broad range of learners.

This study examines evaluation criteria set with regard to students’ ability to move the viewpoint of planetary observation, with particular attention to how much 6^th grade children can understand a science lesson on the topic of “waxing and waning of Venus” by incorporating teaching of cooperative learning and experience with the Venus model into class. After the lesson, the following evaluation criteria were deployed to judge effectiveness: (1) Students can draw a view from space. (They can draw 8 orbits of Venus around the sun. They can draw some parts glowing of Venus.) (2) They can draw a diagram of Venus as seen by telescope from Earth. (They can draw a shape and size of Venus, and understand the place that supports of each of (1).) (3) Students can draw Venus as seen from the observation point. (Fill in the East, West, and South directions, the horizon, and the anglefrom the sun, they understand the place that support of each of (1).) The results of the evaluation revealed that (1) is effective for teaching “waxing and waning of the Venus” in the 6^th grade.