Journal of Baltic Science Education

69-78

Authors: Mustafa Özden

This study investigated to determine and characterize prospective science teachers’ conception of the concept of solution chemistry and its related concepts. An instrument containing open-ended questions was built by the researcher first and administered to 30 prospective science teachers. In addition, semi-structured interviews were administered by researcher with 5 students from the sample in order to clarify their written responses. The results indicated that the prospective science teachers’ understandings of most of the concepts were in specific misconception level. Particularly, prospective science teachers showed good understanding on electrical conductivity of solution, boiling point elevation and characteristics of dissolution process compared to other concepts. On the other hand, they have poor understanding on concept of temperature factor affecting solubility rate, classification of solutions, properties of solutions and difference between melting and dissolution. Furthermore, the results showed that many prospective science teachers could not learn the concepts related to solution chemistry well enough.

88-96

Authors: Muhammet Usak, Pavol Prokop, Mustafa Ozden, Murat Ozel, Kadir Bilen, Mehmet Erdogan

Research on the association between achievement and attitudes belong to fundamental questions in science education research. It is proposed that more positive attitudes are associated with better learning outcomes in science. However, recent research has revealed controversial results either supporting or rejecting the “attitude-achievement hypothesis”. Moreover, very little is known about attitudes toward science among university students. In this study undertaken with a large number of university students in Turkey (n= 1301), we examined whether achievement correlates with attitudes toward biology, whether girls have more positive attitudes than boys as observed in previous research and whether those who enrolled in biology classes show more positive attitudes toward biology than those in humanities. The results indicated only weak, although statistically significant, association between attitudes and achievement. Furthermore, both achievement and attitudes toward biology were not influenced by gender or enrolment in biology classes. These results somewhat surprisingly cast doubts on relationships between attitudes and achievement and effects of gender on attitudes toward biology among university students.

110-119

Authors: Vera Čižkova, Hana Čtrnactova, Tereza Nečesana

Ecology, environmental protection, and education leading to sustainable development are at present one of the dominant educational topics at primary and secondary schools. Though a great deal of attention is paid to teaching of these topics in educational systems of most countries, it is mostly only in terms of theory with a little emphasis on comprehension. One of the ways of how to change this situation is the use of appropriate learning tasks that would make the lessons more interesting, would show a link between these lessons and the practice and would lead to the acquisition of skills, competences and approaches of sustainable character. Therefore our focus was to develop a method of how to create interesting interactive learning tasks and the ways of their application in educational practice. Our research has designed a set of such tasks and verified their effectiveness in practice.