• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.246-258
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• 2010

A convective circulation box was redesigned after analyzing reasons why adolescent elementary school students could not derive a convective circulation concept from the convection circulation box experiments. Even though students were in the formal operational period of Piaget, the adolescents felt difficult to understand a concept of the natural phenomena they have never seen before. Thus, we designed a method to help students increase their scientific understandings about the concept through developing a miniature convective circulation box. Findings indicated that an application of redesigned convective circulation box in the classroom experiment significantly increased the students' understanding about the convective circulations of land and sea breezes, and as well as their participation in the activities. In addition, the redesigned convective circulation box motivated students to develop their scientific thinking skills by allowing them to decide where to put visible incenses inside the box and to directly observe the smoke currents circulation formed accordingly. Redesigning and using a convective circulationbox as a miniature of natural phenomenon helps students avoid having misconceptions. The biggest merits of the box are that it is observable in all directions, it provides much clearer convective circulations comparing to the extant box, and it requires low production costs.