Information useful for teachers can be classified into three categories.
The first category is chemical information: the results of research, including compounds data, theories, experimental techniques and results. Most information of this kind, however, can be obtained from books, dictionaries, or handbooks on chemistry. Therefore, the existing databases in this category, such as CAS, Gmelin, or Beilstein, would be rarely used by high school teachers.
The second category is information related to education: it comes from classroom and is utilized in class, including new teaching materials, new experiments for teacher demonstrations or student practice, reports from research classes, and know-how on classroom teaching. Some of these results are reported in journals on chemical education, such as "Journal of Chemical Education" and "Kagaku to Kyoiku (Chemstry and Education)," or in national or regional meetings on science education. However, the numbers of teachers who have a chance to access to these is quite limited. Therefore, tools for searching existing information are required. In the United States, we suppose, the ERIC data base plays this role, but in Japan no corresponding data base has been available.
The third category is sub-textbooks for students' use. Formerly, this category was of limited importance in class because these were only used for self-study by students. However, the situation has been changed in Japan by the new Course of Study started in 1994, in which project study is introduced in chemistry teching. This requires a vast number of sub-textbooks which are almost impossible to cover at school. In addition, students are encouraged to use computers for, for instance, searching for on-line information, but no data base of this category has been available in Japan.
Recently, two projects have been carried out by Japanese teachers to create data bases in these second and third categories.
"Kagaku to Kyoiku (Chemstry and Education)", formerly called "Kagaku Kyoiku (Chemical Education)", issued by the Chemical Society of Japan, is the only journal focused on chemical education in Japan. It contains papers, articles, information on experimental tools and materials, and teaching tips and know-how - everything that is useful for chemistry teachers, which are developed and reported by teachers. The main target level of this journal is secondary education, namely junior and senior high schools.
Outline: A Project was begun in 1991 to create an abstract data base for all the articles reported in the journal "Kagaku to Kyoiku", aimed at enhancing the utility of the articles appeared in it. The back number project has now reached back to Volume 1 in 1954 and more than 5000 records have now been compiled.
The data base is distributed to the teachers who requested it on floppy disks, as well as through networks, such as NIFTY-Serve, the Japanese version of AOL, or recently through the Internet. Its on-line search is available through the National Academic Center of Scientific Information data base system (NACSIS-IR).
Characteristics: The key features of this project are as follows.
First, the data base was created by users themselves. Although the work is directed by Chemical Society of Japan, through its subcommittee on promoting the project under the editing board of "Kagaku to Kyoiku", and financial support given by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan since 1993, the work of creating the abstract is done by the users. The editors of "Kagaku to Kyoiku" write up the abstracts of currently published articles, and some fifty volunteers, most of whom are high school teachers all over Japan, wrote up the abstracts of the articles issued in its back numbers. The back number project was completed in 1997.
Second, the materials are saved as text files of CSV format, so that they can be used in most of the existing database software in any computer system.
Third, but no less important, is that the data base is distributed together with the search-display software specialized for this data base, which is created by Konno [2]. This software is so designed that it is feasible even to those of computer-beginners.
Impact: In eight years, more than 1000 floppy disks are distributed to the teachers all over Japan. About 100 being downloaded from NIFTY-Serve.
In addition, some other activities for creating data bases have beencarried out by the teachers groups. They are all influenced by this project, because all introduce the same data format as the Chemical Education Data Base, that is, Konno's search-display software is available as it is. For instance:
These tipes of activity mightincrease and be united in the future, to become a real Chemical Education Data Base created by teachers.
The test version of the data base on "Sub-Textbook for Project Study" was promoted with the leadership of Prof. Yoshito Takeuchi of Kanagawa University.
Outline: This project aims to provide students with an data base for Project Study through computer.
A general theme, "Study on Examples of Historical Experiments in Chemistry", is selected, and documents are collected for the individual sub-themes of 'salt', 'copper', 'carbon dioxide', 'Fundamental Laws in Chemistry', and 'Molecular Shape and Isomerism'.
Financial support was given by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan from 1992 through 1994.
Characteristics: The main features of the project are as follows.
First, this is a full-text data base. Since it requires too much effort for a test version to prepare a completely original text, it was decided to use existing books. In addition, figures and tables were also incorporated, so that data base looks like an electronic book.
Second, the selectionand input of text and figures were carried out through the collaboration of seven high school teachers, with OCR software and an image scanner.
Third, Konno created a search-display software program for this data base [4]. In this case, the users are high school students, some of whom are complete strangers to computers. Thus, the software was so designed as to meet the needs of first time users, with a mouse operation and a key word menu system.
Copyright concerns were a critical problem. Fortunately, however, according to Prof. Takeuchi, most of the publishers are quite favorite to the project. They kindly granted the use of their materials for inclusion in the data base and the right to duplicate the product for testing in class.
Impact, limitation, and prospect: As far as we can tell, the response of the students have been good. With only a few minutes' guidance and minimum support, even inexperienced students quickly become used to and enjoy searching documents of their choice.
Although performance of the product is agreeable, this product itself is only a test version. Only a limited distribution and limited use for testing in class is permitted.
In the future, however, if collaboration with publishers is achieved, or if wider collaboration of teachers can be atained on their original product, this kind of data base will be a useful teaching material for students, not only in 'Project Study' but to foster an attitude of autonomous learning. At that time, the materials will be distributed as a CD-ROM, and sound and video information will also be incorporated.
In spite of the efforts of teachers in Japan, the information of most critical necessity has not been compiled into a data base. That is a full materials, including text, figures, tables, and schemes, of the information for category (2). In particular, the most serious lack occurs for materials for experiments, both for teachers' demonstrations and pupil/student practice. These have been reported in journals, annual reports of prefectural education centers, national or regional meetings on science education, and in books of collected experiments.
The problem with the above situation is that these materials are not organized systematically. The materials would be much more accessible, and much more effective for educational purpose if they were arranged on the basis of a systematic curriculum.
In order to overcome the present difficulty, the following three points are essential.
Only the collaborative efforts of government, societies, and teachers would ensure the resolving of the critical problems mentioned above.
Recent development and wider use of the Internet, in particular the World-Wide Web, has enabled teachers to overcome the first point. Each teacher is now able to provide information, which he or she created or processed, by him- or herself in public. This means that the Internet can serve as a media for providing teaching materials created by teachers engaged in the collaboration. In fact, such a collection does exist now in some fields of education, such as environmental education. Sooner or later, this kind of movement will enlarge to cover all fields of teaching, in cluding chemistry teaching. In the not so far future, the wall of language may be overcome and such collaboration may cross the seas and national boundaries, resulting in the world-wide network of chemical educators.
This work was partly supported by the Grant-in-Aid of Scientific Research (06558012) of The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Japan.
(Part of this article was presented at Pacifichem 95 CHED-46 in December 20, 1995, in Honolulu, Hawaii, U. S. A. [6] )