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Bilimsel sorgulama, bilimsel okuryazar birey yetiştirmek için etkili bir stratejidir. Eğitimin her aşamasında kaynak olarak başvurulan ders kitaplarında bilimsel sorgulamanın nasıl sunulduğu bu amaca ulaşmada önemli rol oynar. Bu yüzden çalışmanın amacı, 9. sınıf fizik, kimya ve biyoloji ders kitaplarında yer alan etkinlikleri bilimsel sorgulama açısından değerlendirmektir. Çalışmamızda nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden doküman incelemesi kullanılmıştır. Araştırma materyali olarak incelemesi yapılacak olan kaynaklar Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı Talim Terbiye Kurulu Başkanlığı tarafından onaylanan ve 2017-2018 yılı eğitim-öğretim yılında okutulmak üzere genel liseler ve fen liselerindeki 9. sınıflara dağıtılan kitaplardan oluşmaktadır. Çalışmamıza konu olan 6 adet ders kitabındaki etkinlik ve deneyler Yang ve Liu (2016) tarafından geliştirilen sorgulama tabanlı görevler analiz envanterindeki boyutlara ve o boyutların içerdiği 22 alt boyuta göre incelenmiştir. Elde edilen veriler içerik analizi yapılarak değerlendirilmiştir. Tüm kitaplar incelendiğinde etkinliklerde en çok yer alan alt boyutlar; “Dersin amacına uygunluk’’ ve “Ana düşünce’’ boyutlarıdır. En az yer alan alt boyutlar; “Tahmin’’ ve “Hipotez kurma’’ boyutlarıdır. Ayrıca genel liseler için hazırlanan fizik ders kitabındaki etkinliklerin diğer branşlara göre daha çok alt boyut içerdiği görülmüştür. Bilimsel okuryazarlık hedefine ulaşmadaki önemi düşünüldüğünde, ders kitaplarındaki etkinliklerin daha planlı hazırlanması gerektiği sonucuna ulaşılmıştır., Scientific inquiry is an important instrument for increasing scientific literacy in society. How scientific inquiry is presented in textbooks plays an important role in achieving this goal. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to evaluate the nature and the quality of activities in Turkey’s 9th-grade biology, physics, and chemistry textbooks using a qualitative approach. Six textbooks the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of National Education approved for ninth graders makes up the sample of this study. The Inquiry-based Tasks Analysis Inventory and its 22 sub-scales were developed by Yang and Liu (2016) and used for this study’s analysis. Content analysis was chosen as an appropriate methodological framework for this study. The findings indicate that the activities contain a limited number of sub-dimensions. When examining all the textbooks together, lesson objectives and core ideas are the most common sub-dimensions in the activities, and the least present sub-dimensions are predicting and formulating a hypothesis. The activities in the physics textbook for general high schools were additionally found to contain more sub-dimensions compared to the other textbooks. As one of the fundamental elements of scientific literacy, the representation of scientific inquiry in science textbooks was found to not be at the desired level.

Although understandings of scientific inquiry (as opposed to conducting inquiry) are included in science education reform documents around the world, little is known about what students have learned about inquiry during their elementary school years. This is partially due to the lack of any assessment instrument to measure understandings about scientific inquiry. However, a valid and reliable assessment has recently been developed and published, Views About Scientific Inquiry (VASI; Lederman et al. [2014], Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 65–83). The purpose of this large-scale international project was to collect the first baseline data on what beginning middle school students have learned about scientific inquiry during their elementary school years. Eighteen countries/regions spanning six continents including 2,634 students participated in the study. The participating countries/regions were: Australia, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Mainland China, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States. In many countries, science is not formally taught until middle school, which is the rationale for choosing seventh grade students for this investigation. This baseline data will simultaneously provide information on what, if anything, students learn about inquiry in elementary school, as well as their beginning knowledge as they enter secondary school. It is important to note that collecting data from all of the approximately 200 countries globally was not humanly possible, and it was also not possible to collect data from every region of each country. The results overwhelmingly show that students around the world at the beginning of grade seven have very little understandings about scientific inquiry. Some countries do show reasonable understandings in certain aspects but the overall picture of understandings of scientific inquiry is not what is hoped for after completing 6 years of elementary education in any country.