공동탐구토론대회를 통한 대학생들의 탐구활동 분석과 새로운 탐구과정 제시

Abstract

We analyse the inquiring behavior of college students via 97 Scientific Inquiry and Discussion Contest held at the Department of Physics Education of Seoul National University. The participants to the contest were the students belonging to the Department of Physics Education of Seoul National University. There were 9 teams in the beginning and department professors selected 3 teams for the final contest according to the reports submitted by each team. The subject of inquiry was "Light emerges when we put an electric bulb into microwave oven and tum it on. What is the source of the light?" We examine all the reports of 9 teams and try to find students' process of inquiry for this subject. We find that there is a crucial step in between the stage of observing phenomenon and the stage of setting hypothesis. These two stages have been considered as the first two stages in the conventional inquiring process. The very crucial stage for the subject of 97 inquiring contest, which is a little bit complicated phenomenon, is constructing the structure of inquiry. The teams who made this structure have clearly shown successful inquiry for the subject, while other teams who did not construct the structure of inquiry appropriately have met serious difficulties in the later stages of inquiring process. On the basis of this analysis, we suggest a more refined inquiring process for the students who treat complicated phenomena for their inquiry subjects. The new process is composed of 7 stages. We also analyse special aspects of Korean college students discussion behavior exposed in the 97 contest, which are main drawbacks of Korean students. Since these drawbacks are mostly stem from the problems in basic education in Korea, we strongly recommend that a similar kind of inquiry and discussion contest we did for college students be conducted in the period of primary and secondary schools.