The study aimed to investigate whether classroom norm perspective influence the students' capability of elucidating a natural phenomena and beliefs about scientific explanation. In particular, our objective was to explore the process by which the norm for scientific explanation was established and discover how the students' explanation and their beliefs about scientific explanation altered in this process. A case study approach was adopted and a total of 51 students participated in the study. The data has included videotapes of classroom periods for an entire school semester, individual interviews with the students conducted at the beginning and at the end of the semester, and students' written responses collected in the middle and at the end of the semester in the year of 2012. In creating a sociocultural norm for scientific explanation, the teacher, in the class, was seen declaring his own expectation, negotiating the meaning by making comments on and legitimizing students' accounts, and calling the students' attention towards the important parts of an acceptable explanation. The results indicated that towards the end of the semester, the students' explanation and their beliefs about scientific explanation have considerably improved.

This study aimed to investigate the impacts of contextual factors on the use of students' conceptions. A total of 106 students received a questionnaire involving openended questions on acid-base and equilibrium concepts. Of these students, 16 students who provided complete and accurate responses to the questions participated in an interview. In order to observe the effects of different contexts, in the interview, the conception of acid-base was probed in an equilibrium system. As a result, the students' utterances indicated that (1) a specific problem situation could activate a different part(s) of a concept image, (2) an evoked concept image perfectly working in a particular context could become inadequate in a broader one, and (3) a misconception that could not be observed in a particular context might surface itself in a different one. The results further pointed to the fact that our current definitions and descriptions for acids and bases could be one of the sources of these misconceptions.

The purpose of this study is to examine the capability of chemistry teachers’ scientific explanation on the subject of change of state related to daily life and their beliefs about scientific basis. The sample of this study constituted forty-six chemistry teachers working at different high schools in Gaziantep. The study was conducted following the phenomenographic research method. Within the scope of the study, a test consisting of open-ended questions was conducted to determine the teachers’ capability to make scientific explanations and their beliefs about scientific explanations. Study findings showed that the chemistry teachers participating in this study had inadequacies in making scientific explanations and that their beliefs about scientific explanations were unsatisfactory.

Öz: Bakhtin'e göre metinlerde iki tür söylem vardır: Otoriter ve içten ikna edici (diyalojik) söylem. Otoriter söylemde tek bir ses duyulur; bu ses üstünlere ait olup tartışılmaz doğru kabul edilir ve ulaşılamazdır. Diğer taraftan diyalojik söylemde en az iki ses vardır; bu sesler bireylere ait olan özgün seslerdir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, lise kimya öğretmenlerinin yeni bir konuyu öğretirken derslerinde kullandıkları söylem dilinin otoriter ve diyalojik bakımdan incelenmesidir. Bu çalışma bir vaka araştırması olup sınıf-içi öğretmen-öğrenci diyalogları araştırmanın temel çalışma konusudur. Araştırmaya 10 gönüllü lise Kimya öğretmeni katılmıştır. Her bir öğretmen bir ders saati izlenip dersler ses cihazı ile kaydedilmiştir. Sonrasında ses kayıtları yazılı hale getirilerek analiz edilmiştir. Dedüktif yöntem kullanılarak öğretmenlerin sınıf-içi diyalogları otoriter ve diyalojik söylem bakımından analiz edilmiştir. Kimya öğretmenlerinin öğrenciler ile kurdukları diyalogların yaklaşık tamamının (%99) otoriter söylem dili olduğu araştırma sonunda görülmüştür. Bununla birlikte, bu söylem dilinin büyük bir bölümünde (%80) öğretmenlerin öğrencileri doğruya yönlendirdikleri, az bir kısmında ise öğrenci yanıtlarını yargıladıkları (%14) ya da görmezden geldikleri (%5) görülmüştür. Bu durum öğretmenlerin hala geleneksel öğretim yaklaşımlarını benimsediklerini ve bu yaklaşım temelinde öğretim yaptıklarını göstermektedir.