Determining Levels of 8th Grade Students of Secondary School to Understand Cognitive Structures and Concepts Concerning Concepts of Fundamental Citizenship

Gökçe Kılıçoğlu

doi:10.11114/jets.v6i11.3505

Abstract

Purpose of this study is to determine cognitive structures, conceptual knowledge and misconceptions of the 8th grade students concerning concepts of citizenship through a word association test. In direction of this purpose, a word association test consisting of democracy, sovereignty, independency, freedom, right and responsibility concepts have been applied to 175 8th grade students who studied at 3 secondary schools in Trabzon province during 2017-2018 school years. Conceptual networks have been formed in direction of responses of the students to these concepts, and cognitive structures of the students have been demonstrated. It has been concluded as a result of the study that students associate concept of democracy mostly with equality, right, justice concepts. They associate concept of sovereignty with freedom, nation, independence concepts and concept of independency with freedom, flag and liberty concepts. They also associate concept of freedom with independency, justice, liberty concepts and concept of right with freedom, nation and sovereignty concepts. They associate again concept of responsibility with task, duty and work concepts. It has been determined as a result of the study that a good part of the students can make sentences involving scientific information about freedom, independency and responsibility concepts and they have no misconceptions about these concepts. It has been determined that a limited number of students have misconceptions about the concept of right. As for one of the important results of the study, most of the students have misconceptions about the concept of sovereignty.

Highlights

Social Studies is a field of study arranged with an interdisciplinary approach which reflects subjects of social sciences and citizenship knowledge such as history, geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy (MEB, 2005, p.46) in order that individual can actualize his existence in the society and so that individuals can be raised as a good and responsible citizen
Word association tests (WAT) is an alternative assessment and evaluation technique which enables to observe cognitive structures of the students, connection between the concept creating this structure and information network established in the mind and to determine whether the connection between the concepts has been established in long-term memory or not or whether the connection established is significant or not (Bahar, Johnstone and Sutcliffe, 1999; Bahar and Özatlı, 2003: p.75; Özatlı and Bahar, 2010: p. 10)
Responses given to word association tests are the techniques used in order to demonstrate cognitive structures of the students and the relation between the concepts creating this structure and to determine whether relationships between the concepts brought by the long-term memory are significant or not (Bahar, Johnstone and Sutcliffe, 1999)

Summary

Introduction

Social Studies is a field of study arranged with an interdisciplinary approach which reflects subjects of social sciences and citizenship knowledge such as history, geography, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy (MEB, 2005, p.46) in order that individual can actualize his existence in the society and so that individuals can be raised as a good and responsible citizen. Life by informing them on their rights and responsibilities in the society where they live in, management and structure of the country and national security (Yılmaz, 2003) and raise them as a citizen or individual and contribute to development of democratic-politic period Word association tests are one of the assessment and evaluation techniques which enable to determine cognitive structures of the students about the concepts, whether they have learned the concepts correctly or not, and their misconceptions. Word association tests (WAT) is an alternative assessment and evaluation technique which enables to observe cognitive structures of the students, connection between the concept creating this structure and information network established in the mind and to determine whether the connection between the concepts has been established in long-term memory or not or whether the connection established is significant or not It is expected that the study designed for this purpose would contribute to the literature of social studies in conceptual sense

Study Model

Data Collection Tool

Data Analysis

Findings and Comment

Results and Discussion