중？고등학생들의 적정기술 특성에 관한 이해 연구

A Study on Students' Understanding of Appropriate Technology

This paper aims to explore, as a research on education for appropriate technology, how middle and high school students in Korea understand the characteristics of appropriate technology, which is not value-neutral, but directed towards environmental protection and local sustainable development. To this end, as part of an education programme for appropriate technology, a specific activity of evaluating appropriate technology was developed, where participating students took time to learn about the major features of four appropriate technologies such as renewable energy and energy-efficient ones, and try to use them so as to better understand those features. They then evaluated each technology using the technology evaluation card which was developed particularly for this research. Completing the evaluating activity, most of the participating students responded that they could understand the meaning of each evaluation criterion easily and the activity was helpful in their understanding the characteristics of appropriate technologies. Analyzing the evaluation results, it can be found that the participating students viewed the appropriate technologies largely from three perspectives: usefulness, economic, and environmental ones. It is also noted that some of the appropriate technologies were given less scores from economic perspectives while fulfilling usefulness and environmental requirements. It is finally recommended through this research that an education for appropriate technology need to be more effectively developed from the three perspectives so as to help middle and high school students to better understand the characteristics of appropriate technology, thereby applying and developing them practically.