Determination of the Relation between Undergraduate Students’ Awareness Levels Regarding Their Scientific Process Skills and Application Potentials

Ahmet GÜRSES^1, , Şafak CUYA¹, Kübra GÜNE޹ and Çetin DOĞAR²

¹Department of Chemical Education, Atatürk University, Erzurum, Turkey

²Department of Science Education, Erzincan University, Erzincan, Turkey

Cite this paper:
Ahmet GÜRSES, Şafak CUYA, Kübra GÜNEŞ and Çetin DOĞAR. Determination of the Relation between Undergraduate Students’ Awareness Levels Regarding Their Scientific Process Skills and Application Potentials. American Journal of Educational Research. 2014; 2(5):250-256. doi: 10.12691/education-2-5-3

Abstract

Scientific process skills are those that facilitate learning in science, allow students to be active, improve the sense of responsibility for their own learning, increase their retention skills and also show routes and methods of research. The measurement tool used to measure undergraduate students’ science process skills is a test consisting of 26 questions. This test covers identifying and checking basic skills and variables such as observation, classification, measurement, communication, and prediction using space-time relationships, and integrated process skills such as inference, operational definition, making the interpretation of data and hypotheses and conducting experiments. According to Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive development, questions also knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation aspects. This study, by expediently electing among the education faculties in Turkey, was conducted with 165 undergraduate students from different departments at Faculty of Education of a big university in the Eastern Anatolia province, Turkey to determine the relationship between undergraduate students’ awareness levels regarding scientific process skills and application potential, using survey method which is an implementation of non-experimental quantitative research methods. In the science process skills tests (SPST) prepared for this purpose; the effect of students’ demographic characteristics (grade level, branch, academic achievement, and learning environment) on these skills were studied and results, using SPSS 18.0 software package with an analysis of variance (ANOVA), were statistically evaluated. Of these assessment results; it has been concluded that the difference in levels of awareness of the students lead to significant differences in terms of science process skills application potential, however, other variables and demographic characteristics do not lead to significant differences.

Keywords:
thinking learning scientific process skills basic and integrated processes skills

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