Rediscovery of a child-centered Japanese educational approach : Hypothesis-Experiment Class

Author / Creator

AAPT SM20 (2020)

Conferences

AAPT SM20 PAR-D.06 PER Curriculum and Instruction II (2020)

Available as

Online

Summary

Hypothesis-Experiment Class (HEC) is the educational approach proposed by Itakura in 1963. Since that time, a number of HEC curricular materials have been developed to teach students of all ages a ...

Hypothesis-Experiment Class (HEC) is the educational approach proposed by Itakura in 1963. Since that time, a number of HEC curricular materials have been developed to teach students of all ages a wide range of topics in both natural and social sciences. Although Hatano and Inagaki introduced HEC to the West in the 1980s, it was done in service of discussing findings in cognitive science, and HEC itself has received little attention outside of Japan. That is beginning to change, however, with the recent translation and publication of the book "Hypothesis-Experiment Class (Kasetsu)" in 2019. HEC has been compared with the well-known Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) approach as well as other educational approaches, but there are some salient features that make HEC unique. In this presentation, we will discuss how HEC is similar to and different from other educational approaches, looking in particular at a specific HEC lesson on background radiation.

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