Determination of the concept learning levels of fourth grade students and opinions about concept learning-teaching process of primary school teachers

In this resarch, it was aimed to determine the fourth grade students' learning levels of "muscle, skeleton, bone and arthrosis" concepts and how to classify the muscle, skeleton, bone and arthrosis concepts and determine the opinions of fourth grade teachers on the concept about learning and teaching process. In this study, qualitative and quantitative data were used and convergent parallel mixed research method was used. Population of the study consisted of fourth grade students and their teachers in the city of Kars and itstowns. To obtain of the data, it was used three different scales in this research. Science Concept Achievement Test (SCAT) was created to determine the fourth grade stundents' learning levels of "muscle, skeleton, bone and arthrosis" concepts. Structured Grid (SG) was used to determine how to classify the concepts. It was prepared semi-structured interview questions to determine the opinions of fourth grade teachers on the concept about learning and teaching process. The scale of SCAT was administered to 216 students and SG was administered to 170 students in the town of Kağızman, Kars. 20 elementary teachers were interviewed. As conclusion, it was found that the best known concept was the skeleton while the least known concept was the bone. It was seen that the students made mistakes about the four " mucle, skeleton, bone and arthrosis" concepts and teachers' preferences of using the visual and auditory materials, question-answer technique and fill in the blanks technique more than others. Keywords: science, concept teaching, structured grid, classification mistakes