Investigation of Knowledge Levels of Atomic Concepts of Middle School Students

Abstract

This study was conducted in order to determine the knowledge that middle school students have about the concept of "atom" and the sources from which they learned this information. The study was conducted with a total of 90 secondary school students in the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade of a secondary school in the province of Aksaray in the academic year of 2016-2017. Six open-ended questionnaires were used as data collection tools in order to reveal knowledge of students about atomic concept. The collected data were analyzed and interpreted by the content analysis technique. According to the results of the research, the answers given by majority of the 5th and 6th grade students are wrong; It was seen that 7th and 8th grade students gave the correct answers and expressed the smallest building unit of atomic material. The 5th, 6th, and 7th grade students who responded incorrectly explain the atomic concept with explosives; 8th grade students tried to explain with cell concept. This means that students in the 5th, 6th, and 7th classes will be able to confused the atomic concept with the atomic bomb concept; 8th grade students confused the cell concept.