Investigating Middle School Students’ Conceptions of Technology: The Effects of Gender and Grade Level

Abstract

This study aims to investigate middle school students' conceptions of technology through mental models. Furthermore, it also seeks to determine whether middle school students' conceptions of technology differ according to gender and grade level. The study sample included 1038 middle school students. The research employed a writing-drawing activity and the What is Technology? scale to gather data. When the results were examined, it was determined that only 15.90% of middle school students had good mental models regarding the concept of technology, while 42.48% had medium and 41.62% had poor mental models. Generally, students view technology as a tool that makes people's lives easier and associate technology mostly with electrical and electronic devices such as computers, digital tablets, mobile phones, and televisions. The research revealed that while middle school students exhibited an average grasp of mechanical technologies, they struggled to conceptualize basic technologies. We found that middle school students' understanding of technology did not vary by gender, but did differ statistically significantly by grade level. The findings also showed that higher grade levels were associated with a more sophisticated understanding of technology among middle school students. In conclusion, we observed that the mental models clearly express the dimensions of technology as an artifact, a human practice, and its current role in society. It seems that middle school students' conceptions of technology are limited to these three dimensions, and students have difficulty grasping the nature of technology in all its dimensions.