藤田 剛志

The purpose of this paper is to compare and describe high school students' view of the environment in Japan and Germany and to give an insight into frameworks of thinking hidden in their view. A total of 308 students at upper secondary level in Japan and Germany were tested for their understanding of the environment concept by five forms of test ; free association test (FA), free definition test (FD), aspectizing test (AT), semantic differential test (SD) and multiple-choice test (MC). In this paper we will focus on the FA, SD and MC results alone. The following findings were obtained ; (1) Awareness of the environment in Japanese schools is relatively low, (2) However, both samples pay some attention to global environmental problems, (3) German students regard changes of the environment as critical for human beings and have a deeper understanding about protecting the environment, (4) Japanese students have a more optimistic view about changes in the environment, and regard the environment as rather durable. The results suggest the hypothesis that differences of awareness, attitude and behavior with respect to the environment are partly due to differences in general frameworks of thinking existing in the two countries.

Genetics has been identified by the preceding researches as important and difficult for students to learn. In order to assist students to learn genetics in a more meaningful way, the author examined strategies used by 90 high school students to solve two types of Mendelian genetic problems, and analyzed the errors made by them to identify the knowledge underlying those strategies. The results of this examination and analysis may be summarized as follows : 1. Subjects used more strategies than Stewart had pointed out. Algebraic method, Punnett square method, and other varieties of method were used to solve the dihybrid cross problem. 2. In subjects who erred in this genetic problem solving, the knowledge regarding the meiotic division was deficient. These findings implicated that it is important for students to learn the Mendelian genetics by associating the alleles with chromosome behavior during the meiosis.