This study examined the impact of online peer assessment based on descriptive questions on student learning in Korea. The validity of the scores for student-written descriptive responses rated by ...middle and high school students were compared to teacher grading. The impact of peer assessment activities based on descriptive questions on student learning was also investigated, as was investigated students’ perceptions of peer assessment. First-year middle and high school students studying science were recruited. The results reveal a high level of agreement between peer assessment scores of middle and high school students and teacher grades. The peer assessment activity based on descriptive questions enhanced students’ academic achievement. Students stated peer assessment activity was effective for conceptual learning. This study confirmed the effectiveness of peer assessment activities based on descriptive questions in students’ conceptual learning.
Plain Language Summary
This research delves into an examination of the efficiency, educational effectiveness, and overall experiences of middle and high school students with regard to the online descriptive peer evaluation process. The results of this study conclusively establish that online peer evaluation proves to be efficient for middle and high school students. These students exhibited a commendable ability to accurately score descriptive questions employing a designated scoring rubric, thus rendering their evaluations highly reliable. Moreover, the study confirms the beneficial impact of this process on students’ learning abilities, particularly in the context of composing sincere feedback. Furthermore, this investigation reveals noteworthy enhancements in student conceptual understanding, self-directedness, and writing skills stemming from their engagement in this evaluation process. Notably, this approach emerges as an exceptionally effective teaching and learning method for nurturing students’ comprehension of scientific concepts, especially within the middle school demographic. Additionally, the study highlights the cultivation of learning motivation and a sense of community among students as a direct consequence of their involvement in the online peer evaluation process. Moreover, during the process of evaluating their peers’ responses, students became acutely aware of their own areas for improvement, leading to observable advancements in student metacognition, particularly among high school students. In conclusion, the findings of this research hold significant implications for the development of policies pertaining to online teaching, learning methods, and evaluation systems, especially in countries characterized by highly competitive college entrance examinations.
The primary purpose of the current study is to identify the differences between Indonesian and Korean high school students with regard to science learning orientations based on the inter-correlation ...between conceptions of, approach to and self-efficacy in learning science. A total of 1241 Indonesian and Korean high school students (609 Indonesian and 632 Korean) participated in this study. There were three translated research instruments used in the study, namely; the conceptions of learning science (COLS), the approach to learning science (ALS) and the science selfefficacy, which were all used to identify students' learning orientations in both countries. A Rasch model analysis was performed to seek validation of the instruments, and to obtain students' scores in the interval data form. The Pearson correlation test and a multi-group structural equation modeling were run to respond to the primary purpose of the current study. Based on the results, the current study generated an acceptable model of inter-correlation between COLS, ALS and science self-efficacy. Further analysis using a multi-group analysis generated an acceptable model indicated. The model was significantly different, as mediated by country and notated significant differences in the several identified paths. Cultural impacts on the learning orientations are discussed in order to understand the differences noted in this case.
In the context of formative assessment in classrooms, the incorporation of automated evaluation (AE) systems and teachers’ interactions with them hold significant importance. This study aimed to ...investigate the cognitive processes of pre-service teachers as they engaged with an AE system. We developed an unsupervised learning-based AE system, the Scoring Assistant using Artificial Intelligence (SAAI). SAAI calculates scores without relying on predefined labels and generates scientific keywords from student responses to provide constructive feedback. We collected a substantial number of constructed responses from students, and four pre-service teachers evaluated these responses initially without any external assistance and then re-evaluated them using SAAI scores as a reference point. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this study demonstrated a strong level of consistency between human raters and SAAI scores. Pre-service teachers also reflectively recalibrated their assessments and adjusted their rubrics to identify students’ learning more accurately. This study highlights the practical application of AE in real classroom settings and demonstrates how AE can enhance efficiency and accuracy in K-12 science assessments, thus supporting teachers.
Indonesia is a religious country that values local wisdom and customs. Although the characteristics of the Indonesian people may provide novel insight into and distinguished views on the theory of ...evolution by natural selection, few studies have explored how Indonesians view the theory of biological evolution. Thus, this study aimed to examine the views on evolution of undergraduate students and their professors majoring in biology education. A multiple-case approach was used as the method of this study. Three pre-service biology teachers and three biology education professors were interviewed. The interview results revealed that the six participants embraced creationism without accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection. One intriguing result was that Indonesian professors in this sample tended to see no conflict between evolution and religion. Instead, they believed in seeking harmonization by compartmentalizing evolution and religion. The participants connected their views to the current state of the science curriculum that embraced the idea of harmonization between science and religion. In addition, four categories were found in terms of how the participants approached evolution acceptance and its relation to religion. How the participants negotiated the dilemma between evolution and personal or cultural values is discussed, and suggestions for teaching and learning evolution are presented.
Earthquake activities in and around the Korean Peninsula are relatively low in number and intensity compared with neighboring countries such as Japan and China. However, recent seismic activity ...caused great alarm and concern among citizens and government authorities, and uncovered the level of preparedness toward earthquake disasters. A survey has been conducted on 1256 participants to investigate the seismic literacy of Korean citizens, including seismic knowledge, awareness and management using a questionnaire of citizen earthquake literacy (CEL). The results declared that the citizens had low awareness and literacy, which means that they are not properly prepared for earthquake hazards. To develop an earthquake risk reduction plan and program efficiently and effectively, not only must it appropriately characterize the target audience, but also indicate high potential earthquake zones and potential earthquake damage. Therefore, this study mapped and analyzed the seismic vulnerability in southeast Korea using LogitBoost, logistic model tree (LMT), and logistic regression (LR) machine learning algorithms based on a building damage inventory map. The damaged buildings’ locations were generated after the 2017 Pohang earthquake using the damage proxy map (DPM) method from the Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. DPMs detected coherence loss, which indicates damaged buildings in urban areas in the Pohang earthquake and shows a good correlation with the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) report with modified Mercalli intensity (MMI) scale values of more than VII (seven). The damage locations were randomly divided into two datasets: 50% for training the vulnerability models and 50% for validating the models in terms of accuracy and reliability. Fifteen seismic-related factors were used to construct a model of each algorithm. Model validation based on the area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) was used to determine model accuracy. The AUC values of seismic vulnerability maps using the LogitBoost, LMT, and LR algorithms were 0.769, 0.851, and 0.749, respectively. We suggest that earthquake preparedness efforts should focus on reconstruction, retrofitting, renovation, and seismic education in areas with high seismic vulnerability in South Korea. The results of this study are expected to be beneficial for engineers and policymakers aiming at developing disaster risk reduction plans, policies, and programs due to future seismic activity in South Korea.
Creativity is considered a key element of the scientific infrastructure and a driving force of scientific advancement. This study aims to present Korean scientists' voices regarding scientific ...creativity by investigating their perceptions of scientific creativity and education for it. Extending the phenomenography lens through activity theory, we interviewed eleven scientists in various science research fields and investigated the structural features of the situations that influenced their perceptions. The results show that scientists' perceptions of scientific creativity were developed by the different epistemic cultures in their research fields. In addition, their perceptions of education for scientific creativity centred on the accumulation of resources to generate novel and valuable ideas and the facilitation of open discussion on knowledge construction. We discuss their perceptions of creativity in the context of their research fields' epistemic cultures and the design of science education for scientific creativity. We conclude by discussing the implications of this study for developing science education to cultivate creative scientists.
This study demonstrates the relations of the position of education in the correlation between religiosity, and socioeconomic variables by using national-level, and large survey data. We used data ...from the international survey of 68 countries, and used statistical methods to create the composite scores of every variable. Next, we used Pearson and partial correlations to determine the significance of the relations between the three variables and path analysis to investigate the directions. The correlation coefficient between academic and religiosity variables was a significant and negatively high correlation; furthermore, the partial correlation was strong and significant when the socioeconomic variable was controlled. The correlation between religiosity and socioeconomic variables was a significant and negatively high correlation, and the partial correlation was not significant when the academic variable was controlled for. The correlation between academic and socioeconomic variables was a significant and positively high correlation, and the partial correlation was significant when the religious variable was controlled for. The path analysis reveals that the direction is as follows: socioeconomic, education, and finally, religiosity. Based on our results and the reviewed literature, this paper discusses how these results contribute to the secularization theory and how education mediates religiosity and socioeconomic variable.
The exploration of career values can motivate and inspire young people, and help them achieve career success. The current study assesses the effect of sociocultural background on adolescents' career ...value among 951 Indonesian and 1,242 Korean secondary school students. Latent class analysis results suggest that participants can be grouped into five classes: personal-stability oriented, ability utilization, social-status oriented, social-relation oriented, and multi-valued leadership. Furthermore, the result of a three-way ANOVA indicated significant interactions for country, gender, and educational level on all career values for every class. The findings are discussed in the sociocultural contexts of Indonesia and Korea.
Accurate, rational, and scientific decision making is now considered to be the most important skill in science education. Many studies have found that overconfidence bias is one of the cognitive ...biases hindering people from achieving such decision making. Gender and country play crucial roles in overconfidence bias. For instance, some particular cultures and genders tend to be more overconfident than others. However, whether or not the two variables interact to influence overconfidence bias also indirectly influences decision making, especially in the context of science education. The purpose of this study is to identify the effects of country and gender on performance, confidence, and overconfidence bias in the samples of Indonesian and Korean high-school students while doing on a biology exam. The twenty-one American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) questions on the topics of genetics and evolution were administered to 297 Indonesian and 235 Korean high-school students, in their first and second years. Every question was featured with a question asking students how confident they are in answering the question correctly. The two-way Analysis of Variances (2-way ANOVA) test was used to answer the research questions. Based on the analyses, we found no significance interactional effects of gender and country in test scores. In contrast, we found a significant interactional effects in both confidence in genetics and evolution. Regarding overconfidence bias, for which that we merged both concepts, we found that country had a higher influence on students' overconfidence bias than did gender. Additionally, we found the hard-easy effect phenomenon followed overconfidence bias phenomenon. The relationships between country, gender, science education, cognitive bias, and overconfidence bias are discussed. Suggestions for reducing overconfidence bias are also provided.
Our study explored the prospects and limitations of using machine-learning software to score introductory biology students' written explanations of evolutionary change. We investigated three research ...questions: 1) Do scoring models built using student responses at one university function effectively at another university? 2) How many human-scored student responses are needed to build scoring models suitable for cross-institutional application? 3) What factors limit computer-scoring efficacy, and how can these factors be mitigated? To answer these questions, two biology experts scored a corpus of 2556 short-answer explanations (from biology majors and nonmajors) at two universities for the presence or absence of five key concepts of evolution. Human- and computer-generated scores were compared using kappa agreement statistics. We found that machine-learning software was capable in most cases of accurately evaluating the degree of scientific sophistication in undergraduate majors' and nonmajors' written explanations of evolutionary change. In cases in which the software did not perform at the benchmark of "near-perfect" agreement (kappa greater than 0.80), we located the causes of poor performance and identified a series of strategies for their mitigation. Machine-learning software holds promise as an assessment tool for use in undergraduate biology education, but like most assessment tools, it is also characterized by limitations. (Contains 4 tables and 4 figures.)
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