The assessment of the hearing-impaired students' science process skills in experimental activities of scientific topics

The purpose of this study was to assess the hearing-impaired high schoolstudents' science process skills through experimental activities in science laboratoryduring a 7 week period.A secondary aim in the study was to determine whether there were anyrelationships between the levels of hearing loss, the age they started to use hearing-aids,the age they started to have family education and intelligence test scores and their scoresof science process skills. It was also inquired whether there was a relationship betweenthe score of their science process skills and their class levels.In this study, 19 hearing-impaired students were observed. During the study, thestudents were individually observed in the science laboratory, and in this context, thestudents were applied a scale means of science process skills including 3 experimentalactivity and 5 different activities.At the end of the observation, it was found out that skills of classifying and usingof tools, were over average and enough level. It was determined that there were averagelevel acquisitions in the skills of measuring, forming models, formulating hypotheses andinterpreting data and that there were average and low level acquisitions in the skills ofobserving, taking notes about the data predicting and using numbers and space-timerelations. It was also found out that there were low and insufficient level acquisitions inthe skills of determining the results and controlling the variables. It was concluded thatthere was not a meaningful relationship between the students science process skills andthe levels of hearing-loss, the age they started to use hearing aids, the age they started tohave family education and intelligence test scores according to the multiple regressionanalysis is applied at the meaningfulness level of 0.05 in MINITAB program.There was not a meaningful relationship according to the single variance analysisresults applied at the meaningfulness level of 0.05 in MINITAB program used todetermine whether the total scores the hearing-impaired students had from the scienceprocess skills and the scores they had from each skill were related to the class level ornot.