Examination of secondary school students conceptual understanding of astronomy according to their teacher's attending the astronomy course

The purpose of this research is to determine students' conceptual understandings about Astronomy subjects. For this purpose, the study was conducted according to the descriptive method, one of the qualitative research approaches. The sample of the research consists of 153 students and 5 science teachers studying in the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades. As data collection tools in the study, an open-ended question form containing demographic information, word association test and drawing test were applied to the students, and an open-ended question form was applied to the teachers. The data were analyzed descriptively and the findings were presented in tables as frequencies and percentages. According to the findings; it has been understood that the understandings of Astronomy students in 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades are different from each other and from the valid meanings of the concepts. The differentiation of concepts from thein valid meanings is slightly less in students of teachers who do not take Astronomy courses than in students of teachers who take the course. It has been determined that the students of the teacher taking an Astronomy course reflect the descriptive characteristics of celestial bodies in their drawings, and that the students in the group of the teacher taking an Astronomy course and those of the teacher not taking an Astronomy course understand the concept satasimilarrate. According to the findings of the word association test, it has been concluded that there are wrong conceptual understandings about the concept of the Moon. It was concluded that teachers who did not take Astronomy courses were more interested in Astronomy subjects than teachers who took Astronomy courses. According to the findings of this study, students' conceptual understanding is closely related to their teachers' interest in the subject and the irself-improvement.