Investigation of Doctoral Theses in the Field of Physics Education in Turkiye in Terms of Theoretical Framework and Conceptual Framework

The theoretical framework and conceptual framework help to determine the purpose of scientific research, facilitate the analysis of data, organize the thoughts of researchers, increase the reliability of research, and ensure that research is shared in a wide area. Although these two concepts seem to be basically the same, they have structural differences and the roles they assume are not same. Despite this, it is seen that many researchers use these two concepts when structuring their academic studies without fully distinguishing between them. In this research, 87 doctoral theses in the field of physics education in Turkiye from past to present were examined in terms of theoretical framework and conceptual framework. In the study, the case study, which is one of the qualitative research approaches, was used and the obtained data were analyzed with descriptive method. As a result of the findings obtained, it was seen that all of the theses had at least one theoretical framework or conceptual framework, and instead of these two titles, five different titles were used: theoretical framework in 29 of 87 theses, conceptual framework in 18, introduction in 18, literature review in 15 and general information in 7. When the distribution of theses in terms of theoretical framework and conceptual framework was analyzed, 64 of the 87 theses were evaluated under the titles of conceptual framework and 23 of them were evaluated under theoretical framework titles. In addition, when the distribution of approaches, theories, models, strategies and methods used in the theses was examined, it was concluded that they were mostly accumulated in the learning-teaching, conceptual understanding, cognitive dimension and affective dimension categories.