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While much is known about the high academic but low affective achievement of Korean students on international comparative studies, little is known about science teacher education in Korea. As the quality of science teachers is an important factor determining the quality of science education, gaining an understanding of science education in Korea necessitates understanding the science teacher education system and the ways of leveraging quality science teacher preparation. Korea has a unique science teacher education system in many aspects due to its unique socio-cultural background. This study critically reviews the current state of the science teacher education system in South Korea in terms of the outcomes and institutional backgrounds, such as associated law and policy, teacher education curriculum, recruiting system and examinations. A careful review is conducted of the previous literature, official documents and statistics from the Korean government, and curricular documents from some teacher education institutions. The paper concludes with a discussion on the uprising issues in science teacher education within the socio-cultural context of Korea and offers implications to the international science education community.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between moral sensitivity for topics related to science and preference for science, and belief about learning science. 129 middle school students were involved in this study and completed questionnaires to measure moral sensitivity for topics related to science, preference for science, and belief about learning science. Students' responses were analysed to show the distribution of variables and the correlation between variables by gender and grade. As a result, moral sensitivity was not affected by respondents' grades and genders, but was affected by different topics. Preference for science was not affected by respondents' grades and genders, while belief about learning science was not affected by respondents' genders but affected by lower grade. There were correlations between students' moral sensitivity and preference in case of female students and higher grades, as well as relationship between moral sensitivity and belief about learning science. This result infers that students who have higher moral sensitivity can prefer science and show more positive belief about learning science. Also, it can implicate that affective domain including interest or belief can play an important role in the context of science education focusing on moral aspect or ethics, and that teachers should be aware of personal differences in case of teaching moral aspect of science.