ERIC Number: EJ1107761
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Aug
Pages: 36
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0926-7220
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Special Theory of Relativity in South Korean High School Textbooks and New Teaching Guidelines
Gim, Jinyeong
Science & Education, v25 n5-6 p575-610 Aug 2016
South Korean high school students are being taught Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. In this article, I examine the portrayal of this theory in South Korean high school physics textbooks and discuss an alternative method used to solve the analyzed problems. This examination of how these South Korean textbooks present this theory has revealed two main flaws: First, the textbooks' contents present historically fallacious backgrounds regarding the origin of this theory because of a blind dependence on popular undergraduate textbooks, which ignore the revolutionary aspects of the theory in physics. And second, the current ingredients of teaching this theory are so simply enumerated and conceptually confused that students are not provided with good opportunities to develop critical capacities for evaluating scientific theories. Reviewing textbooks used in South Korea, I will, first, claim that the history of science contributes to understand not merely the origins but also two principles of this theory. Second, in addition to this claim, I argue that we should distinguish not only hypotheses from principles but also phenomena from theoretical consequences and evidence. Finally, I suggest an alternative way in which theory testing occurs in the process of evaluation among competitive theories on the basis of data, not in the simple relation between a hypothesis and evidence.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Physics, Science Instruction, Textbooks, Teaching Guides, Scientific Concepts, High School Students, Science Education
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: High Schools; Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: South Korea
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A