Abstract:

Japanese elementary and lower secondary school teachers are still facing many difficulties to teach the filed observations designated by the Government of Japan Course Guidelines, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2008. This is caused by their poor experience and practical knowledge of the subjects. In order to solve the problems and to make their teaching more practical, we initiated and have been revising a teacher training program since 2014, which covers not only oral explanation but also in situ experiments on the phenomena observed on the outcrops. On the basis of their deficit knowledge and the requirement for them to be able to undertake basic observations, the connection of outcrops and landscape with human life, history and industries is arranged, therefore we sorted out two rivers, Chinai and Momose rivers, on western shore area of Lake Biwa, Shiga prefecture, central Japan. The Chinai river in north and the Momose river in South occur at a distance of 0.5 km in the estuary and 6 km in the upper stream, respectively. The Chinai river originated in granitic rocks yields chestnut in the alluvium fan and swimming beach with white sand on the shore. The Momose river originated in sedimentary rocks yields persimmon in the fan and dark beach where no one swims. At the outcrops in upper, middle and lower streams of the rivers, not only explanation but also experiments on the phenomena observed on outcrops were performed. The in situ experiments were the classification of grain size of sediments with sieve analysis, strata in plastic bottle, and the weathering of granitic rocks. The participants of the training learned the basic concept of discussing an outcrop. They were impressed by the experiments and gave this program good evaluation report. The result of pre- and post- questionnaire showed that the teachers conquered the difficulty in teaching the subject in Earth Sciences and the field observations.

Keywords:

Teacher education and training, field observation, in situ experiments, Earth Sciences