Determining photonics education framework for science education: A Delphi study

Photonics is an important science and technology field of the twenty- first century in providing a sustainable future with the green solutions. As the place of photonics and photonic technologies in our daily lives increases, the need for a workforce trained in this field and citizens equipped with knowledge and skills in this field, who can evaluate its benefits and harms, and who can participate in socio-political issues when necessary, will increase. Education plays an important role in meeting this need. For this reason, the aim of this thesis is to investigate how photonics education should be. In order to investigate how photonics education can be delivered most effectively in classroom environments, (1) the subjects and contents related to photonics, (2) skills and attitudes related to photonics and photonic technologies, and (3) effective teaching processes-teaching methods and assessment techniques- were discussed with experts in this field. In the research, interviews were conducted with people who were determined as experts in the field by using the Delphi technique, and then the experts were allowed to reach a consensus with the questionnaire. Field experts consist of 3 sub-groups: educators, scientists in the field of photonics, employees in the photonics sector. The results of the research show that field experts advocate using the nature of science and the history of science in order to emphasize the science dimension of photonics in photonics education, and it would be beneficial to give the topics over daily life examples for the technology dimension. In addition, they suggested that students gain skills such as questioning, scientific and analytical thinking, problem solving and designing photonics experimental setups through laboratory courses, project-based and problem-based methods. They think that evaluations should be process, performance, project or product oriented, and suggest contextual-based and experiment-based questions to accompany these processes. As a result of the research, a Photonics Education Framework was developed by summarizing the findings. In addition, in order to determine the need for photonic literacy and to add additional value to the study, the Photonics Education Framework for Photonics Literacy was created and presented by bringing together studies on science literacy, reviewed literature and the findings of this study.