The relationship between eighth grade students' nature of science understanding and their informal reasoning on socioscientific issues

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2021-8-02

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Irmak, Nesibe Fatıma Nur

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The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between eighth grade students’ nature of science understanding and their informal reasoning on socioscientific issues. The study was performed with 414 8th grade middle school students in four different public middle schools of Turkey in Ankara, Altındağ. In the present study, correlational research approach was used. Background information about participants was collected by personal information questionnaire. The participants’ nature of science (NOS) understanding was determined through Views of Nature of Science Elementary Level (VNOS-E) questionnaire whose open-ended questions assess empirical-based, tentativeness, and subjectivity tenets. The participants’ informal reasoning was determined by using the open-ended informal reasoning questionnaire focused on three different socioscientific issues: global warming, acid rain, and genetically modified food. The findings of Pearson correlation analysis revealed that in each of the three different socioscientific issues and in total, there was statistically significant and positive correlation between informal reasoning quality and varieties of informal reasoning modes. The results of multiple regression analysis revealed that all three tenets of NOS made statistically significant unique contributions to the prediction of informal reasoning quality score in global warming issue and genetically modified food issue. Empirical-based and tentativeness tenets made statistically significant unique contributions to the prediction of informal reasoning quality score in acid rain issue. Thus, it was concluded that there was statistically significant relationship between eighth grade students’ nature of science understanding and their informal reasoning in global warming, acid rain, and genetically modified food issues.

Subject Keywords

Socioscientific issues, Informal reasoning, Nature of science

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/92078

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

N. F. N. Irmak, “The relationship between eighth grade students’ nature of science understanding and their informal reasoning on socioscientific issues,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2021.