teaching materials for technology education
government announced the revision of the teaching guidelines for junior
high schools, which are to be fully enacted in April 2012. According to
the new guideline for the subject of Technology Education, “measurement
and control by programming”, “growth of living things”, and “energy
transformation”, which had previously been elective topics, are to
become mandatory. Therefore, it will be necessary to develop compound
teaching materials that can be used to teach these topics. In this
research, we developed practical teaching material synthesizing these
topics. The developed teaching material is an automatic watering system
in which soil water is measured and used as feedback to control the
watering mechanism. As a preliminary test before introducing this
teaching material in junior high schools, we administered mock lessons
to university students five times. The average scores for all the
question items improved after the lesson, and the improvement was
particularly remarkable for the questions about acquiring knowledge.
Technology educationin junior high schoolsis important not only because itwill prepare a technologically proficient workforce, but also because it will educate a technologically literate citizenry capable of makingintelligent personal and public policy decisions [1].Therefore, whenthe Japanese government announced the revision of the teaching guidelinefor junior high schools, which cover grades seven, eight, and nine,in March 2008, the following topics in the subject of Technology Education thathad previously been electives weremademandatory: (a) “measurement and control by programming”;(b) “growth ofliving things”;and (c) “energy transformation”.In addition, the objective of Technology Education in the new guideline is to acquire basic knowledge and skills about “materialsand their processing”,“energy transformation”, “growth of living things”,and “information technology”through practical and firsthand learning activities. However, the total class time period allocated to Technology Education was not increasedin therevision.
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