The purpose of this study was to develop the design elements of teaching strategies in order to foster students’ ability to construct an argument based on multiple reasoning and to clarify the effectiveness of their design elements. Design elements are guidelines that encourage reflective teaching strategies in science lessons. In this study, three design elements were specified for the lesson preparation phase, and seven design elements were specified for the implementation phase. The lesson was a sixth grade science unit on the nutrition of plants, and the class was taught in a way that guided the students to discover how plants obtain nutrients. In order to evaluate whether the students’ability to construct an argument improved through the lesson that reflected the design elements, two evaluation tasks were given to students: to write an argument on the lesson content, and another argument on a lesson already learned. The results of the former showed that more than 80% of the students were able to construct an argument based on multiple reasoning. Furthermore, the results of the latter showed that the score on the number of reasoning used was significantly higher for the argument written after the lesson compared to the one before it. These findings indicated that the design elements developed in this study were effective for improving the students’ ability to construct an argument based on multiple reasoning.

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It has become apparent that educational reforms aiming at fostering students’ competency and skills have been gathering momentum. This study reviews educational activities as well as curricula that are thought be useful for thinking about educational reforms in fostering competency and skills in science class. The study also describes some current situations of proactive and collaborative learning in science classes in Japan. It points out that, in order to promote proactive and collaborative learning, it is necessary to relate content, learning activities, competency and skills well. At the end, which is designed to help teachers to teach science lessons with more proactive and collaborative learning, a model of lesson study in science has been suggested based on the concept of curriculum management.

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The aim of this study is to indicate effects of the function of feedback through the formative assessment of strategies for self-regulated learning in science classes. This research developed a design of science learning in which feedback works at four levels (Task level, Process level, Self-regulation level and Self-level.)
As a result, it was revealed that feedback improves the students’ construction of scientific concepts and promotes autonomy, metacognition and self-evaluation while embodying self-regulated learning in science classes.

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The purpose of this research is to identify trends in question types used at different stages of inquiry activities in Japanese primary school science textbooks. This purpose was established to present a perspective for lesson studies. Therefore, ‘questions’ written in the primary school science textbook were extracted to build a data set, following which the types and stages of questions were cross tabulated, and the results considered. The following trends were identified as findings of this research: (1) many questions are set at the ‘background’, ‘problem’, ‘result’, and ‘implication’ stages of the problem solving process, (2) many ‘what kind of’ and ‘how’ questions are used, particularly in the content area of ‘life’, (3) yes-no questions are frequently used in the content area of ‘particles’, (4) questions set at the ‘method’ stage are mainly used in grade 5. Several suggestions for the adequate selection of questions, according to content area and stage, were obtained from the analyses.

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In this study, we examine effective teaching methods of zoo education in collaboration with elementary school science education with regard to learning about the topic “life”. We continued practical research through the interactive discourse analysis of the instructor and children, both in the zoo and in a school, from a constructivist view. As a result, children’s conception of life developed through the instructor’s scaffolding through querying. Children spontaneously discovered various aspects of the zoo animals and thought about the relationship between their features and how the animals live in the wild.

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The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of social interaction on metavisualization. Metavisualization is a metacognitive skill, and is an important skill for learning chemistry. We developed a theoretical model of the process of metavisualization considering the social level of metacognition by relating it with a representational network model.
Results indicate that:
(1) Metavisualization can play a central role in improving the interrelating three levels of representations, that is, the macro level, the sub-micro level, and the symbolic level.
(2) Metavisualization is promoted through social interaction involving observation sharing ones’ and others’ metacognitions and outcomes.
(3) To promote students’ competence of metavisualization, they need to express their own visual images and reasoning, and to take into account the external visualizations or thoughts of other students, so teachers need to support student interaction based on their assessment of the students’ expressions of their visual images.

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In this paper, we discussed three points: “Setting the research topic”, “Developing the lesson”, and “Proving the effects of the lesson” of our science education research according to the outline of the special issue.
Then we revealed the examples of how science education research contributes to improve science lessons. The example of the two-year lesson study showed that the science education research contributed to the improvement of the teachers’ ability in lesson planning, teaching, and creating effective teaching materials and lesson plans.
Therefore, we conclude that science education research contributes a lot to further improve science lessons, and that the world needs to be informed of this research and continuous process of science education refinement to enhance laypersons’ appreciation of teachers’ science lessons.

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This study defined whether or not “The Four Question Strategy (4QS)”, a teaching method used to build up a hypothesis, is applicable to observations and experiments at elementary and lower secondary school. Simultaneously, it examined all the observations and experiments in science textbooks of elementary and lower secondary school (published by “X” Publishing Company) on the basis of the types of observations and experiments classified by Hasegawa and colleagues regarding presence or absence of causal relations to show the applicability of the 4QS.
As a consequence, when looking at the applicability of the 4QS, the types of observations and experiments classified by Hasegawa and colleagues were integrated into three categories each for elementary and lower secondary school. Furthermore, it was clarified that the applicability of 4QS was possible in experiments conducted by students in the fifth grade or higher, in which the requirements were controlled. It was also elucidated that, even in phenomena with causal relations, the applicability of the 4QS was not appropriate in experiments where the requirements were not controlled, or in observations of phenomena for which causal relations were not assumed to exist.
The knowledge obtained in this study is expected to contribute to designing science classes that nurture students’ problem-solving ability and competence in scientific inquiry.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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