An applicable study on the meanings attached to the conceptions of good and bad elementary school fourth students

This study focuses on the concepts of good and bad in the world of thought of primary school fourth grade students. It is aimed to comparatively examine the students' knowledge, attitudes and behaviors related to the aforementioned concepts before and after the application. The participants of this study, which was carried out in an experimental design with the qualitative research method, are 25 primary school fourth grade students. Data were obtained through interview form, activity documents and researcher observation notes. Descriptive analysis and content analysis were used for data analysis. In the study, it has been tried to reveal how the students define the concepts of good and bad, what they see as specific to whom or what, their ideas about whether good and evil change from person to person, the reasons for doing good and evil, and their views on whether a person can do good or bad for himself through causality relations. In the first interview, the students accepted the concept of goodness and goodness as the same and answered the questions by exemplifying human-specific behaviors; In the last interview, it was seen that by distinguishing the concepts of goodness and goodness, they made statements that criteria such as suitability for purpose and providing benefit can also be accepted as goodness. In the first interview about the concept of evil and evil, it was seen that they tried to exemplify human-specific behaviors and in the last interview, they defined evil by including inanimate beings and situations. When the examples given by the students about goodness and evil were examined, it was concluded that they only gave examples of moral evil in the first interview, but they included natural evils as well as moral evils in the last interview. In the first interview about the reasons for doing good, it was seen that the number of reasons that the students presented within the scope of fulfilling the religious requirements decreased in the last interviews. Based on the results, it is emphasized that goodness and evil are behaviors that are done by people's conscious choices and that affect society, and the necessity of individuals to be aware of their responsibilities for both themselves and the society.