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There has been a recent increase in research interest in the ways that visual representation is used to facilitate students' understanding in science classrooms. Yet while many studies have explored individual students' drawing, few studies have looked into drawing as a collective tool to engage students in thinking and talking together in science classrooms. This study employed a case study approach to understand some of the possibilities for visual representation construction as a collective reasoning tool. By examining two cases of visual representation construction during classroom talk in two elementary science classrooms, this study demonstrates how teachers use visual representation as an instructional strategy, and how visualization engages students' reasoning, meaning making, and social interactions. We selected two cases that demonstrate the emergence of the teacher's and students' drawing activities and analyzed each with a focus on the interactions that occur during the construction of visual representation and how this interaction promotes scientific reasoning and meaning making. For the case analysis, three researchers reviewed the video cases separately several times, and then collectively developed in-depth discussion to bring forth possible themes. The findings include: (1) that there were common grounds of visual representation established for collective reasoning; and (2) that visual representations expanded knowledge and reasoning from the individual to social level, thus playing a critical role in students' reasoning and knowledge building during classroom talk. Pedagogical questions and reflection are discussed for further research on visualization as a cognitive and social tool in classrooms.

Engineering ethics education typically focuses on decisions by individual engineers and case studies of disasters. This does not reflect the everyday decisions that practicing engineers must make, and neglects the fact that most engineers work on teams rather than alone. The focus on safety and disaster prevention leaves little time for discussing pervasive social impacts of engineering and technology. Our research seeks to fill these gaps by determining how ethical decision making occurs in team settings, how it can be influenced by ethics-focused team members, and to what extent a social context influence consideration of social impacts. Over three years, we observed ethics discussions among teams of engineering students. First, we observed undergraduates during their Capstone Design project. We contrasted typical teams and teams with an additional team member trained and educated in engineering ethics. Second, we observed university research laboratory groups composed of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs in their spontaneous and regular conversations. Data analysis suggests that engineering students have a narrow understanding of engineering ethics, and that their explicit and implicit understanding can be in conflict. We also observed that an engineering expert can improve the breadth and depth of conversations. We also observe that engineering students rarely--if ever--discuss ethical or social implications of their work during routine activities. This also points to the benefits of facilitated discussions.

Conducting scientific inquiry is expected to help students make informed decisions; however, how exactly it can help is rarely explained in science education standards. According to classroom studies, inquiry that students conduct in science classes seems to have little effect on their decision-making. Predetermined values play a large role in students' decision-making, but students do not explore these values or evaluate whether they are appropriate to the particular issue they are deciding, and they often ignore relevant scientific information. We explore how to connect inquiry and values, and how this connection can contribute to informed decision-making based on John Dewey's philosophy. Dewey argues that scientific inquiry should include value judgments and that conducting inquiry can improve the ability to make good value judgments. Value judgment is essential to informed, rational decision-making, and Dewey's ideas can explain how conducting inquiry can contribute to make an informed decision through value judgment. According to Dewey, each value judgment during inquiry is a practical judgment guiding action, and students can improve their value judgments by evaluating their actions during scientific inquiry. Thus, we suggest that students need an opportunity to explore values through scientific inquiry and that practicing value judgment will help informed decision-makings.

With the passing of Korea's Gifted Education Act, creativity has come to the forefront in considering the future of Korea's economic prosperity in the global economy (Korean Educational Development Institute, 2003). The purpose of this study was to examine the understanding of creativity among Korean science teachers of gifted students. Sixty teachers participated in this study with an open-ended questionnaire about their understanding of creativity. The data were analyzed based on Urban's (1995) three components of creativity. The findings indicated that these science teachers had a thorough understanding of the cognitive component and a strong association of creativity with intellectual ability, but overidentified with the cognitive component, showing less awareness of the personal and environmental components of creativity. To shift their understanding to a more balanced view, personality and environmental components, as well as attributes in other component areas, should be emphasized.

The purpose of this study was to investigate Korean children's environmental literacy levels and the variables that affect their environmental literacy. An instrument, the Environment Literacy Instrument for Korean Children (ELIKC), was developed that measures four different dimensions (knowledge, attitude, behaviour, and skills) using 69 items and 13 demographic variables. The ELIKC was administered to 969 Year 3 students from large cities, medium-sized cities, and rural areas. The students were given 80 min to answer the questions. Statistical analysis was performed on each of the scales that make up the ELIKC and a multivariate analysis of variance was performed to identify the variables that affect environmental literacy. Results indicate that the correlation between attitude and behaviour is the strongest while that between knowledge and behaviour is the weakest. Also, it was found that gender, parents' school background, and the source from where students obtain environmental information affect all categories of environmental literacy. (Contains 6 tables.)