No abstract

Despite the breadth of coverage and collaboration, few empirical studies have concerned educational background and its implementation in order for scrutinising the reasons for students' high scientific literacy in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 at international level. Rather, many report the data as evidence of successful accountability in a country. In order to illuminate reasons for the high achievement, experts from Finland and Korea participated in a web-based survey. Their opinions revealed heterogeneous contributors: Korean parental support and private education, and Finnish policy involving educational equality; Finnish and Korean teacher education; and Korean centralisation, and Finnish devolution of curriculum and its implementation. Because of the reasons which are irrelevant to the policy orientation of PISA, careful analysis of the educational background and implementation ought to be recognised in advance of reporting the students' achievement as evidence of national accountability.

Many models in science education have tried to clarify the causal relationships of affective variables on student performance, by presenting theoretical models, exploratory SEM (structural equation models), and confirmatory SEM. Based on the literature, the recent AS-TI-CU model scrutinised the most robust stimuli of conceptual understanding (CU): intrinsic attitude towards science (AS) and topic interest (TI). However, the confirmatory model has not been extended to estimate how students achieve in the secondary science or in Korea where student's disengagement in science is prevalent. Sampling 10 th-and 11 thgraders in Korea (N = 219), this study thus aims to clarify how the forth factor "school achievement (SA)" interacts in the structural equation modelling. The multiple-group SEM analysis in AMOS7 reveals that student's intrinsic AS stimulates their school achievement in both graders and that their topic interest abnormally discourages school achievement only in the 11 th-graders. The findings provide explanations for the latent threats of negative attitudes and for the "age 14's dip". Lastly, how to form a theory of persuasion of attitude change is discussed for a further research question.

ABSTRACT. In inquiry-based science education, there have been gradual shifts in research interests: the nature of scientific method, the debates on the effects of inquiry learning, and, recently, inquiry teaching. However, many in-service programs for inquiry teaching have reported inconsistent results due to the static view of classroom inquiries and due to the partial perspective between individual and collaborative reflections. Thus, by means of a theoretical progress model of collaborative reflection, this qualitative research aims to investigate reflections of four participant teachers before and during a half-year in-service teacher program. The model captures the following four interactions for each individual teacher and among the teacher cohort: belief to practice, practice to belief, stimulation, and reinforcement. The audio-video data and their quantification allowed identification of the teachers' consistent prior beliefs and practices as a multiplicity of inquiry teaching and their interwoven progress during the program. The findings are further discussed in terms of the implicit development and the richer repertoire.