Determining 7th grade students' conceptual understanding levels and misconceptions about cell division

In science courses, cell division is a difficult subject to understand, and misconceptions are common since it contains complicated processes. Misconceptions make it harder for students to understand topics, increase the amount of misunderstanding, and make learning more challenging in the future. The aim of this study is to develop a two-tier test to determine secondary school students' misconceptions about cell divisions and to determine their conceptual understanding levels and examine them in terms of various variables. Studies on the validity and reliability of the two-tier test were carried out. For content validity, the opinions of a biology education expert and a science teacher were taken and the content validity was checked with the specification table. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to test construct validity. As a result of item and test analyses, the reliability of the test and the difficulty and discrimination values of the items were determined. Following the required modifications, a two-tier cell division test consisting of 10 items was developed. The test's average difficulty was found to be 0.41, and its reliability, as assessed by the KR-20 formula, was computed to be 0.74. The developed test was applied to 401 7th grade students in the 2022-2023 academic year. As a result of the data analysis, it was determined that the conceptual understanding levels of the students differed significantly according to gender, science course grade point averages and the region where the school is located, but did not change according to participation in science projects. As a result of the study, it was determined that the students' conceptual understanding levels about cell divisions were low and they had various misconceptions. The study's findings will be helpful to educators in preventing the development of misunderstandings.