The perceptions of the elementary students in chemical concepts

In this study the perceptions of the elementary education students in concepts taught in science lessons, their perceptions to the scientifically proved explanations, and differences according to their schools and their sex is studied.The study is conducted with students from eight grades, from five elementary schools from different locations of Ankara. In the study, in order to find out about students? perceptions about chemical concepts, a conceptual chemistry test that includes questions about concepts of particle, atom, ion, molecule, element, compound, mixture, pure object, chemical bonds, and physical and chemical change is used. This test is applied to all the eighth grade students of every school (totally 464 students). The answers that are given to the tests are defined as percents, in order to see the general tendency. As the result of the chemical concept tests? evaluation, the ratios of the selection of the correct answers were low. It is seen that this tendency was approximately the same in every school.The private courses are considered as common high schools that has students from all kinds of school. According to the average of the correct results of the conceptual test of chemistry, students are chosen in pairs by their performances from all the intervals: over the average, on the average and below the average. Interviews are made with these six students; these interviews are recorded on a voice recorder and then transcripts were created. The results of the conceptual chemistry test were supported with the interview results in order to find out about student?s perceptions about the chemistry concepts in the science and technology programs.As a result of this work, it is understood that the students couldn?t perceive the chemical concepts well enough. Although they managed to make the definitions close to scientific definitions, it is observed that students had problems in plotting them on the models. According to results of independent sampled t-test, there is a significant difference between male and female student groups? average results from the chemistry concepts test at the 5% significance level. Since average results of the female students were above the average of male students, it can be concluded that female students perceive chemistry concepts better than male students.