Elementary school students’ perceptions about nature of scientific knowledge and some pseudoscientific ideas

Abstract

In early childhood, people develop some beliefs that can affect the whole lives. Developing pseudoscientific beliefs can cause differences on child’s nature of scientific knowledge. Giving importance on prevent gaining pseudoscientific knowledge may help qualified lifelong learning abilities. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the elementary school students’ nature of scientific knowledge and views about some common pseudoscientific ideas. Also some variables’ impacts on data collection tool scores were searched, too. The study was conducted on 2014-2015 educational year with 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade elementary school students. In the study, Nature of Scientific Knowledge Scale (NSKS) and eight statements were used to collect data. The aim of these eight statements was to figure out students’ pseudoscientific ideas about evolution and nature of science. SPSS 20.00 programme was used to analyze data. It was found that girls’ total scale scores were found higher than boys’ total scores. Girls’ amoral, parsimonious, testable and unified sub-dimension scores were also found higher than boys’ scores. 7th grade students showed higher total scale scores than the other grade students. Also, it was seen that 7th grade students have more sophisticated knowledge about evolution than the nature of science features. At the end of the study the findings were discussed according to literature and some suggestions were given.