New Perspectives in Science Education

A survey of Japanese university students on their level of understanding of meteorological learning revealed that although they remembered bits and pieces of knowledge such as high and low pressure systems and fronts, they did not have enough knowledge to predict future weather and temperature changes based on weather maps, which are important in their daily lives.

Analysis of the background to this situation suggests that the textbooks used in elementary and junior high schools are not systematic, and that teachers simply teach knowledge according to the textbooks, which results in students learning only fragmentary knowledge without a firm understanding of the essence of weather phenomena.

In an interview with a research collaborator, a teacher who teaches science at an elementary school, he said, "I am not good at teaching weather units," confirming that the teachers' weakness has resulted in classes that only teach knowledge from the textbooks.

In order to improve this situation, the author collaborated with elementary school teachers to design a learning program in the field of meteorology as a class based on a conceptual-type curriculum and QFT (Question Formulation Technique), and tried out the class by introducing experiments not included in the textbook. From the children's reflections on the lessons, it became clear that this curriculum was very effective in learning to connect to the essence of meteorological phenomena. In this article, we report on the effectiveness of this curriculum based on the results of our survey.

Keywords    Weather Learning   Question Formulation  elementary school

References.

[1] H.Lynn Erickson,Lois A.Lanning,& Rachel French,2017,Corwin : Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom second edition 

[2] Dan Rothstein , Luz Santana,Make, 2011,Just One Change : Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions  Harvard Education Pr