7 th school students' understanding of about science, scientific knowledge and scientist

Abstract

Understanding of science, scientists and scientific knowledge is important to science teaching. Students come to classroom with their own knowledge and they reformulate their existing knowledge. Students' views about science and scientists have been widely studied. Therefore as a measure of the 7th-grade students' understanding of science, scientists and scientific knowledge in Turkish educational perspective compose the aim of the study. Case study which is a qualitative research design was used for the study. A phenomenographic framework was used to guide the analysis of data collected from: a series of 20 semi-structured interviews with 7th-grade student attending to a state elementary school in Denizli/Turkey during 2009-2010 instructional year. Analysis of the data suggested that the students' concepts of science, scientists and scientific knowledge were fragile, or unstable, and likely to change positively within the time frame of the study. © Sila Science.