• Journal of Science Education
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.294-309
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• 2013

This study addressed the awareness of social issues related to science of future elementary school teachers. Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident was used by concrete issue connected with SSI for this study. Twelve second-year students attending a university of education participated in the study, who were taking a class of science teacher preparation at that time that consists of the content of the elementary science education courses. The study revealed that all the pre-service elementary teachers recognized Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident and received such information through various medias. In particular, they were receiving more information about the Nuclear Power Plant Accident through the internet than any other media by using the internet a lot, and also gained additional information through the internet. However, despite the fact that they recognized Nuclear Power Plant Accident, they neither had much information about it nor had been interested in SSI such as the Nuclear Power Plant Accident. Moreover, they had been basically uneducated about SSI. Despite of having no interest in SSI such as Nuclear Power Plant Accident, the study revealed that the pre-service elementary teachers recognized that scientific problems such as Nuclear Power Plant Accident may affect a society closely. In addition, they together sympathized with the point that SSI education should be applied on the current education courses by identifying the problem in application. As the study revealed above, the application of SSI education to the formal education courses as well as more lively research on that subject is very important and urgent for boosting interest in science subjects and enlightening the nature of science that is one of the objectives of science education.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.273-288
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• 2020

This study aims to investigate the presentation of the Nature of Science (NOS) in integrated science textbooks of the 2015 revised curriculum. The five integrated science textbooks published by the revised 2015 curriculum were analyzed with the conceptual framework of the four themes of the Nature of Science (NOS) (Lee, 2013) based on scientific literacy. The four themes of the NOS are 1. nature of scientific knowledge (theme I), 2. nature of scientific inquiry (theme II), 3. nature of scientific thinking (theme III), and 4. nature of interactions among science, technology, and society. The reliability of the textbooks analysis was measured between two coders by the Cohen's kappa and resulted in between 0,83 and 0,96, which means the results of analysis was consistent and reliable. The findings were as follows. First, overall theme II, nature of scientific inquiry emphasized on the integrated science textbooks of the 2015 revised curriculum by devoting the contents over 40 % in the all five publishing companies' textbooks. Second, while the theme II, nature of scientific inquiry was emphasized on the textbooks regardless of the publishing companies, other themes of the NOS were emphasized in different portions by the publishing companies. Thus, the focus among other three themes of the NOS was presented differently by the publishing companies except that in theme II, nature of scientific inquiry was most emphasized on integrated science textbooks. Third, the presentation of the NOS was identified similarly across the topics of integrated science textbooks except on topic 4. Environment and Energy. The theme IV, nature of interactions among science, technology, and society was emphasized reasonably only in the topic of Environment and Energy of the textbooks. Finally, the presentation of the NOS in the integrated science textbooks of the 2015 revised curriculum were more balanced among the four themes of the NOS with focus on the scientific inquiry compared to the previous curriculum textbooks.