Application and evaluation of qualified life-based open-ended question preparing course developed for science teachers

In today's world, countries are in the goal of continuous improvement and self-renewal. Every major change in the country is thanks to education. In this respect, education and teacher training it is therefore of great importance. The importance of teachers in educating individuals to carry the countries at the upper levels is great. However, it is considered important for the teachers to be well educated, to constantly renew themselves and to receive necessary trainings in the process. Some organizations are made that determine the positions of the countries and their level of education at the international level. The most known of these is the PISA implementation by the OECD. The PISA exam has been carried out on three fields, mainly every three years since 2000. These areas are; mathematics literacy, science literacy and reading skills. Our country began to participate in this practice in 2003 and has continued to participate every three years since that year. The results of the PISA exam was seen as a problem in our country at this point. Our country displays a graph below the average and far from the developed countries according to the exam results. There are differences between the question types in our country and the question types in the PISA exam. Therefore, our students are considered to be foreign to the questions in the PISA exam, and this situation is returning to our country as a failure. If our teachers start to prepare qualified and context based questions such as the PISA exam and compare their students with such questions, it is thought that education will be linked to daily life and our students will increase their habit to these questions in time and raise our country's position in international examinations. For this ultimate purpose, a teacher training was prepared to prepare such questions. The training lasted 10 weeks, 6 weeks theoretical and 4 weeks practice. Opinions of 13 volunteer science teachers were taken before, during and after the training. In this direction, it is aimed to reveal the thoughts of teachers about open-ended questions and education. As a result, many thoughts about education have emerged. In this way, a cloud of information has been created about what to add or remove in subsequent trainings. Content and descriptive analysis were performed and presented on the obtained qualitative data. According to the findings of the research, teachers think that open-ended questions are useful. In addition, with this training, the teachers indicated that the points of view to open-ended questions changed significantly and positively. They also added that the use of rubrik creates significant changes to the open-ended questions. Teachers have considerations about continuity and dissemination of education by mentioning that they find education useful. Looking at the open-ended questions prepared before and after the training, changes are seen in the questions. Teachers have stated that they are learning to prepare life-based questions in a real sense. They also support that education is beneficial. In addition, participating teachers have a positive opinion of comparing their students with such questions and tend to continue to prepare questions. Detailed analysis and suggestions accordingly for the entire weekly studies were presented.