Investigation of middle school students' attitudes towards socioscientific issues and decision-making skills in terms of various variables: Uşak case

This study has two aims: The first one is to determine how middle school students' attitudes toward socioscientific issues (SSI) and their decision-making skills are and to examine the relationship between middle school students' attitudes towards SSI and their decision-making skills. The second aim of the study was to examine middle school students' attitudes toward SSI and their decision-making skills in terms of various variables (gender, grade level, and parental education level). A cross-sectional survey modelwas used in this study. The questionnaire used in the study consists of two parts: The first part includes questions about students' age, gender, grade level, family income, parental education level, whether they heard about SSI, whether they heard about various SSI (global climate change, genetic tests, cloning) and the sources of learning about SSI. The second part is the Attitude towards the SSI scale and the Decision-making skills scale. The attitudes towards the SSI scalewasoriginallydeveloped by Klaver and Van der Molen (2020). It was translated and adapted into the Turkish language by AlkışKüçükaydın, Gökbulut, and Şahinpınar (2021). The scale has 19 four-point Likert-type items under six factors: 'personal interest', 'school interest level', 'positive emotions', 'anxiety', and 'shared competence and dependence on others'.The decision making skills scale was developed by Sever and Ersoy (2019). The scale consists of 15 items and is unidimensional. After obtaining the relevant permissions, the questionnaire used in the study was administered to a total of 1065 secondary school (5th-6th-7th-8th grade) students (493 female and 572 male students) enrolled in public schools in Uşak province. Since some of the students did not respond to the entire attitude and decision-making skills scales, the data of 51 students were excluded from the total data set and analyses were made on the data of 1014 students. The results revealed that the total attitude scores of the middle school students participating in the research were above average and they had positive attitudes towards SSI. In addition, the average total scores of middle school students' decision-making skills toward SSI were found to be high. Correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between total scores of attitudes toward SSI and decision-making skills. The findings revealed that there was a moderate relationship between the total attitude scores of middle school students and their decision-making skills. When the middle school students' attitudes towards SSI and decision-making skill mean scores were examined according to grade level, it was seen that the decision-making skills of 6th -grade students were more developed than other grade levels. When the attitude scale is analyzed, it is seen that the attitude scale scores of 5th-grade students are more positive than other grade levels. When decision-making skills and attitude scores are analyzed according to grade level, it is seen that decision-making skills do not change according to grade level. Attitude scores, on the other hand, differed significantly according to grade level. While it was determined that middle school students' decision-making skills did not change in terms of gender, their attitudes were found to be significant in favor of female students implying that female students have more positive attitudes. Similarly, there is a significant difference with respect to attitude sub-dimensions (personal interest, school interest, and concern) found in favor of female students. In other words, the mean attitude scores of female students in these dimensions are higher than male students, but the effect size of this difference is small. Finally, it was examined whether the decision-making and attitude skills of middle school students varied according to the level of parental education. It was found that decision-making skills differed significantly according to both mother and father education levels. Post-hoc analyses showed that as the level of mother's education increased, the average scores of decision-making skills of middle school students increased. No significant difference was found between the mean decision-making skills of students whose mothers graduated from university and postgraduate institutions. Again, it was determined that the mean decision-making skills scores of students whose fathers graduated from university and graduate institutions were higher than those of students whose fathers were illiterate. Keywords: Socioscientific issues (SSI), middle school students, decision-making skills, attitude