Investigation of the activities in the subject matter of "Substance and its Nature" in the 6th, 7th and 8th grade science course books in terms of the scientific process skills

This study aims to examine the activities in the subject matter "Substance and its Nature" in 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade science course books in terms of scientific process skills levels of scientific process skills. In the study, the case method, which is one of the qualitative research designs, was used. Activities in the subject matter "Substance and its Nature" in the 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade science books were subjected to the document analysis in terms of scientific process skills they contain. In addition, semi-structured observations were made by the researcher about what skills 2 teachers from 2 different schools used in activities throughout the subject matter "Substance and its Nature" in the 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade course books. In the study, it was detected that the activities in the course books did not have a systematic distribution in terms of scientific process skills. The skills of "observing, measuring, classifying, recording data, interpreting data, making conclusions, making experiments and making decisions are skills" that are widely used in course books and in the implementation of activities. It was found that the skills of "relating number and space, determining variables, hypothesising, using data and modelling, changing and controlling variables" were less used in the activities in the course books than other skills. Although the activities included in the course books have scientific process skills, it is suggested to include as many skills as possible in the implementation of the activities and give more importance to using the less frequently used skills.