Secondary school 8th grade students' metaphorical perceptions of socioscientific issues in science course

The aim of this study is to reveal the perceptions of secondary school 8th grade students about socioscientific issues and the meaning they give to these perceptions through metaphors. The participants selected within the scope of the study were determined by criterion sampling method from purposeful sampling type. A total of 103 eighth grade students studying in three secondary schools in the city centre of Iğdır province participated in the study. The study was conducted according to the phenomenology design, one of the qualitative research designs. In order to determine the students' perspectives on socioscientific issues, an interview form consisting of open-ended questions focused on socioscientific issues selected from the science curriculum was developed by the researcher with the help of literature review and expert opinion. In the form, there are open-ended questions focusing on 10 socioscientific issues in total. It was asked to produce metaphors for each socioscientific issue. For example: "Blood donation is like ...... Because .....". Content analysis technique was used to analyse the data. At the beginning of the analysis, all the data obtained were analysed and out of the total 103 forms obtained in the research, 26 forms that were not filled in accordance with the purpose were removed from the research and the research was continued with 77 forms. Valid metaphors were presented in tabular form under the title opened for each socioscientific topic, first in frequency (f) and percentages (%), then in alphabetical order, and qualitatively similar metaphors were grouped under categories together with the reasons for being related. According to the results of the study, it was seen that the students had knowledge about the socioscientific issues in the form. It was seen that students reflected their perceptions about socioscientific issues with a large number of metaphors and it was seen that different numbers of people responded to different socioscientific issues. The metaphors created for each socioscientific topic were also analysed and it was determined that positive, negative and two-way metaphors were created for different socioscientific topics. As a result, it was observed that the students had knowledge about the characteristics of socioscientific issues in general, and with the determination of a large number of different perceptions towards different socioscientific issues, it was once again revealed with this study that socioscientific issues should take more place in science education and science research.