Students' opinions about teaching of the controversial topics in the social studies

The objective of this study is to determine opinions of middle school 7th grade students about the contentious topics. Scanning method of quantitative research method was used for the study. Target population of the study composes of the students of the schools in Manisa. Sample of the study composes of the 7th grade students of five public schools in Manisa/Demirci. During the construction process of the questionnaire, item pool was constituted and took its final form as five point likert form of 20 items, in accordance with experts' opinions. Questionnaire was performed with 203 students; data were inputted into the SPSS 22 program and analyzed. All items' arithmetic means, standard deviations and frequencies in questionnaire were determined, tabulated and interpreted individually. "Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H" tests were used to determine students' opinions on which topics can be argued in the class and .05 significance level was used for interpretations. Findings of the study shows that foremost topics that students want to argue in class are respectively; Human Rights, Multiculturalism, Electoral System, Animal Rights and Freedom of the Press. The topics that students do not want to argue in the class are Terror and Violance. When the findings of the study were examined in accordance with different variables like gender (A1 Military System, A3 Religious Community, A5 Fanaticism, A11 Cloning), reading book (A20 Telecast), taking private lessons (A11 Cloning), education levels of fathers (A3 Religious Community, A4 Multiculturalism), education levels of mothers (A1 Military System, A3 Religious Community, A11 Cloning), job of father (A3 Religious Community, A5 Fanaticism, A10 Internet, A16 Election System), job of mother ( A3 Religious Community) and income status of family (A10 Internet), significant differences were detected. Following the searches, any study on the "students' opinions about teaching controversial topics in social studies classes" is not obtained. Teachers' opinions can be added to study and a more broad study which contains students' and teacher' opinions together, can be conducted.