An investigation of middle school students' perceptions of constructivist learning environment in science education in terms of gender, grade level and academic achievement

In this study, it is aimed to investigate the perceptions of middle school students' perceptions of constructivist learning environment in science education in terms of gender, grade level and academic achievement. Survey research was used in the current study. For the purpose of this study, the data was collected from 5, 6, 7, and 8th grade students in a public school in Bartin province in a spring semester in 2018-2019 academic year. For the data collection "Constructivist Learning Environments Scale" was used. In order to reveal the general purpose of the study, the collected data were analyzed using SPSS 22 package program. The results of the descriptive analysis considering independent variables such as gender, grade level and academic achievement were examined and inferential analyzes were conducted to determine the significance levels. In addition, three-way analysis of variance was used for inferential statistics. The results revealed that the middle school students' perception in science education was close to the constructive learning environment. Based on the results, it was determined that the perceptions of learning environment differed according to gender, grade level and academic achievement. It was found that girls perceived the learning environment more constructivist than boys; 5th and 6th grades perceived the learning environment more constructivists compared to 7th and 8th grades; and those with higher academic achievement levels perceived the learning environment more constructivist than those with lower academic achievement levels. When the perceptions of middle school students in terms of learning environment were investigated in terms of factors, the results revealed that student perceptions were closer to the constructivist learning environment in terms of personal relevance, uncertainty and critical voice factors, except for the shared control and student negotiation factors. In the light of these results it can be said that the middle school students' learning environment perceptions get more constructive when their learning more correspond to their real life experiences, put more emphasize on nature of science and let them expressing their learning in more democratic environment. In addition, for the future studies these results can be supported by qualitative studies and more detailed results can be obtained. In this wise, a significant contribution can be made into science education to provide solutions to the problems experienced in schools in implementing constructivist environment.