| Research Abstract |
The results of the research are as follows;
1. The number of science teachers at lower secondary schools is around 11.9%, which is reasonable while considering the total number of all subjects. However, a high anomaly is observed in the percentage of teachers in different fields of science (physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences). The number of teachers with the earth science background is about only 0.6%, which should be raised up to around 3% in order to keep in balance to other fields of science.
2. Earthquakes are taught within "The environmental science and geology", "Science", "Geography" and "Science", "Science" and "Geography", and "Geography" and "Geology" at mainly upper secondary schools in Egypt, Nepal, New Zealand, Brazil, and Argentina, respectively. Therefore, we found that main interested domain of earthquakes is not relationships between people and nature of earthquakes but mechanisms of them in Japan. On the other hand, for instance, earthquakes are taught in the New Zealand science curriculum and the New Zealand geography curriculum. This is because one of their aspects is impact on society by earthquakes. This aspect is lack of earthquakes education in Japan.
3. Current contents of the field of earthquakes in Schools in Japan are not enough to acquire the earthquake literacy. For instance, one of the earthquake literacy is ability to understand articles related to earthquakes on newspapers.
4. We propose new earthquake curriculum from primary schools to tertiary education based on the results of above 1, 2, and 3. Moreover, we studied how to teach earthquake's contents come from new curriculum for primary and upper secondary school students through practical classes. Results indicate that our proposed curriculum is reasonable. However, we found that we need to make new teaching guidebooks, several new materials and so forth for teachers in order to be understood the meanings of new curriculum.
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