Primary 8 grade students' about biotechnology approaches and measure the levels of knowledge

Dizzying technological developments in the 21st century, in biotechnology in particular, are of interest to people and social life. However, the need for biotechnology increases more every day.Students will shape up the future by following biotechnological developments and will sit at the steering- wheel of technology in our country. Therefore, this study is conducted to determine our students' interest, approach and level of knowledge towards bio-technology.In this direction, a biotechnology questionnaire to measure interest and approach of the 8th graders and a biotechnology achievement test to measure up their success are applied. Besides, students' approach are examined to see whether they vary or not in accordance with the environment they live, gender, family income, education and study conditions, study time, examples given by their teacher about biotechnology, their views on biotechnology and finally if any biotechnology examples are given in other classes.Following the analyses, it's been reached a conclusion that the 8th graders have positive views on biotechnology and that gender, family income, education level of parents, living environment, views of teacher, and profession of their fathers do not make any considerable difference about views of the students. In addition, a meaningful relation is found between the students' interest in biotechnology and how many hours they spend for concentrating on biotechnology issues and if they are given any examples of biotechnology in other courses. Moreover, it's been concluded that inclusion of biotechnology in textbooks and more class hours on biotechnology could be beneficial.