The evaluation of chemistry laboratory experiences on science students' anxiety levels

Abstract

Since improvement of Chemistry is based on laboratory researches, doing an experiment in a laboratory is an important part of chemistry learning in order to educate new generations in a scrutinizing way. To educate individuals will be able to carry out some researches in the future's classes who has some abilities such as thinking, expressing one self, and creativity problem solving, has a big importance. In this study, whether students' anxiety levels toward laboratory changed or not were investigated by doing experiments in a chemistry laboratory. For that purpose, in 2008-2009 autumn term, 100 students taking general chemistry class (4 branches from second classes - department of science teaching in primary school, faculty of education of Pamukkale University) participated in this study (as an example). In this scope of study, chemistry laboratory anxiety scale developed by Bowen and translated into Turkish by Uzuntiryaki and Azizoglu was used. At the beginning of the semester, chemistry laboratory anxiety scale was administrated to the students as a pre-test before taking general chemistry class. During the term, experiments take parts in the lesson's content have been carried out. At the end of the semester, chemistry laboratory anxiety scale was administrated to the students again as a final test. Having comparison pre-test with final test, it was determined that there has been a decrease in students' anxiety by means of this implementation.