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The aim of this study is to examine the change in the cognitive structures of elementary school students in respect to the concept of science through word association test in a constructivist approach based project. The study was conducted with 50 students attending to 6 th and 7 th grades who participated in a project supported by The Scientific and Technologic Research Council of Turkey in 2014-2015 academic year. Students were applied a 90-minute activity in scope of the training on science, scientist and scientific knowledge under the project that lasted for 5 days. A word association test that included the concepts of science, scientific knowledge, scientific method, scientist, research, project, experiment and laboratory was applied at the beginning (pre-test) and at the end (post-test) of the project. While word association test was applied, the students were asked to write down the words which were constructed in their minds by the given concepts. A frequency table which consists of concepts of word association test and response words were prepared in data analysis. According to the obtained frequency table, concept networks that revealed the cognitive structures of students were drawn. Upon reviewing the frequency table of the pre-test and post-test of students, and the concept networks, it was observed that the cognitive structures in the relevant concepts of students changed positively. Accordingly, it was concluded that word association tests prove an effective method for revealing the cognitive structures of students. Study findings were discussed in comparison with the studies in the literature, and recommendations were given.

3rd World Conference on Educational Sciences (WCES) -- FEB 03-07, 2011 -- Bahcesehir Univ, Istanbul, TURKEY, WOS: 000466750602092, The aim of this study is to develop an Astronomy Concept Inventory (ACI) to assess undergraduate students' conceptual understanding of moon phases, moon and earth motion. ACI consists of 25 multiple choice questions with four distracters. The inventory was administered to 262 undergraduate students who took introduction to astronomy course. The data were analyzed by ITEMAN software program. The difficulty indices ranged from .45 to .92, and discrimination indices ranged from .21 to .59. The mean P value as difficulty index was found to be .66 for the test while alpha value for whole test was found as .80. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd., Ankara Univ, Near E Univ

The present study intended to assess students' knowledge on an ecology test which consists of two parts, multiple choice and open ended section. It also aimed to find out the effect of school, gender and grade level on the student performances in the test. This study employed a survey approach. The sample was consisted of 212 seventh and eighth grade students attending four elementary schools in Kirikkale city, Turkey. In this study, a previous data (Oner Arma an, 2006) were re-analysed. The analyses of independent T-test, Mann-Whitney U test, and ANOVA with SPSS revealed that there were some differences between schools and gender groups on the parts of the test. On the other hand no differences were found within grade levels. When the multiple-choice section of the test was considered, the mean scores of the male students were significantly higher than the females; in open-ended section of the test the mean scores of the female students were significantly higher than their counterparts. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

World Conference on Educational Sciences -- FEB 04-07, 2009 -- Nicosia, CYPRUS WOS: 000275580400102 One of the basic subjects that chemistry students have difficulty is chemical equilibrium. Learning of the particulate nature of matter can increase students' achievement in this subject. In addition to this, students' interest, belief and attitude towards chemistry or the nature of matter are factors effecting achievement. In this study the effects of understanding nature of matter and attitudes on university students' achievement in chemical equilibrium subject were investigated. Moreover the effects of gender and department on students' achievement were also examined. It was found that students' attitudes effected their achievement in chemical equilibrium; on the other hand attitudes affected students' comprehension of nature of matter. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The purpose of this study was to determine the overall effectiveness of conceptual change texts (CCTs) on academic achievement and to find out if effectiveness was related to some characteristics of the study. It followed up a Meta-analysis research approach. 42 published and unpublished studies, published between 1995 and 2010, and 42 experiment groups’ effect sizes were tested in this study. The overall effect size for CCTs was calculated as 1.18. This is a large effect size according to Cohen’s criteria. It was found that CCTs have been quite successful in promoting the students’ academic success. However results showed that there was no publication bias in respect to publication status. Moreover, no statistically significant difference was found on the nature of assessment instrument, study origin, subject matter, type of instruction, school level, sample size, type of instrument, publication date and duration of treatment. Moreover statistically significant difference was found for instruction effect. The effects of the research results are discussed.