Investigation of the primary school 4th grade students' attitudes towards asking questions in tems of teachers' and students' perception

The aim of this study was to determine the Primary 4th grade students studying attitudes towards asking questions at the class level. The research was done with mixed method design, sequential hybrid method design. In the first stage, a qualitative study was carried out for exploratory purposes, in the second stage, a scale for measuring students' attitudes was developed. In the third stage, quantitative data were collected by using the developed scale. When determining the sample of the study, maximum variation sampling, one of purposeful sampling methods was used. The qualitative part of the study consisted of 9 students and 7 teachers. The quantitative part consisted of 203 students in the scale development stage and 334 students in the administration of the developed scale. "Semi-structured Teacher Interview Form", "Semi-structured Student Interview Form" and "Attitude Scale Toward Questioning" were used as data collection tools in the research. As a result of the interviews with the teachers, they talked about the characteristics of students asking questions, the situations of those students, the nature of students' questions, the teachers' approach to students asking questions, situations preventing and encouraging to ask questions. Moreover students mentioned the reasons and situations of asking and necessity of asking question and they talked about the situation that prevents them to ask questions. In the quantitative part of the study, qualitative data were analyzed by means of content analysis, and the attitudes related to the questioning process were written in a sentence for developing attitude scale. As a result of the expert opinion and the pilot application, a draft form of the 39 item Attitude Towards Question-Anxiety Questionnaire was developed. The draft form was applied to 203 primary school students selected by appropriate sampling method. For the purpose of item and reliability analysis, exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were used in order to examine the factorial structure of the scale. As a result of EFA and CFA, a scale with 25 items was obrained. The Attitude Scale toward Asking Questions was applied to 334 students. As a result of the analyzes, students' level of openness to asking questions was high and their level of anxiety about questioning was low. Mathematics and Science courses were the courses what they asked questions the most.