EXAMINATION OF PRE-SERVICE BIOLOGY TEACHERS’ KNOWLEDGE LEVELS AND KNOWLEDGE SOURCES ABOUT GENETIC MATERIAL

Özet

As one of the science lessons, biology courses contain many abstract concepts. Students usually have difficulty in perceiving these concepts. It is necessary to determine effective ways of facilitating and the understanding of them as well as the knowledge level of the students. For this reason, teachers have important tasks in teaching abstract concepts effectively. Molecular biology and genetic material is one of the topics in biology that students have difficulty in understanding. In this respect, the aim of this study is to examine the knowledge levels and knowledge sources about genetic material of pre-service teachers. Within this scope, the knowledge levels of the freshmen who have started the undergraduate education and the seniors who are about to complete the undergraduate education have been compared. Also, sources of pre-service teachers’ correct and incorrect knowledge have also been examined. This study has been held in the academic year between 2016 and 2017. The study sample included 91 pre-service teachers studying in the department of biology education in two different public universities in the Central Anatolia region in Turkey. The data have been collected from a questionnaire form which has 23 items related to genetic material and 5 items related to determine the sources of the knowledge. The data have been analyzed with SPSS 22.0 software and in the analysis of the data, various descriptive statistics were applied. As a result of the research, the differences of the knowledge levels about genetic materials between freshmen and seniors have been evaluated. When the averages of the final grade of pre-service teachers’ about the genetic material were examined, the knowledge levels of seniors were higher than the freshmen but not at the desired level. The sources of the correct and incorrect knowledge have been evaluated separately. As a result of the analyses, pre-service teachers really have difficulty in understanding the abstract subjects and they have misperceptions.