The Turkish Primary Students’ Understanding Of Scientific Events and Questions

Abstract

The students’ scientific conceptualizations of the things are important as they are responsible for their attitudes and behaviours. Therefore, it is believed that knowing about the students’ understanding of scientific questions and events are important as they are the indicators of their science self-concept. The purpose of this study was to explore the Turkish primary students’ understanding of scientific issues on the basis of scientific events and questions including their conceptions on being scientific. In order to achieve this, 30 students from six different schools located in the different parts of one of the western cities in Turkey were interviewed by using semi structured interview form. At the end, generally it was seen that students are not able to express their own understanding of scientific events and questions. Moreover, explaining the meaning of being scientific was quite challenging. Interestingly, the majority of students ignored the methodological issues of science besides having difficulty in easily relating the science to daily live.