Journal of the Turkish Chemical Society Section C Chemical Education (Mar 2022)
Content Analysis of Dissertations on Socio-Scientific Environmental Issues in Turkey
Abstract
The present study analyzed the dissertations published at the teacher training level in Turkey, including the socio-scientific environmental issues, with descriptive content analysis. The "socio-scientific" was used as a keyword, and 118 dissertations published in the Council of Higher Education Thesis Center database until November 2021 were accessed. Sixty-six (not at the teacher training level) and twenty-nine (not including socio-scientific environmental issues) dissertations were excluded from the analysis. Twenty-three dissertations were analyzed based on the publication year, type (master/doctoral), participants, socio-scientific environmental issues used in the dissertation, and the methodology of the dissertation. Dissertations with experimental research methods were also examined in their learning approach and dependent variables. The results showed that dissertations whose topic socio-scientific environmental issues at the teacher training level were published between 2008 and 2021, and the highest number of dissertations took place in 2014 and 2019. master and doctoral dissertations had a close percentage to each other. Nuclear power plants/nuclear energy were used as the most frequent socio-scientific environmental issue. The survey research design was preferred more than experimental research in the dissertations, and argumentation was used commonly as a learning approach. One unexpected result was the absence of a dissertation whose participants were preservice chemistry teachers. Preservice science teachers were mainly selected as participants in the issertations, there was no dissertation whose participants were pre-service chemistry teachers. Socio-scientific issues cover chemical topics. Interestingly however, no dissertation has been conducted on socio-scientific environmental issues related to chemistry at the level of preservice chemistry teachers.
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