No abstract

No abstract

This study examined the effect of an inquiry-based learning method on eliminating misconceptions about the charging of insulating and conductive materials. The study was conducted using three inquiry-based activities prepared by the researchers. The participants in the study were 19 pre-service teachers enrolled on the General Physics 2 course at Dokuz Eylül University. The qualitative data in the study consisted of the responses the students gave to the open-ended questions posed in the inquiry-based activities while the quantitative data consisted of the results obtained from the electrical conductivity concepts test (ECCT). It was found from a review of the responses given to the open-ended questions that the students believed that insulators could not be charged by induction, that neutral objects were uncharged, that the inner surfaces of conductive materials could be charged just like their outer surfaces and that the electric field inside insulators corresponded to zero. It was established at the end of the activities that almost all of these misconceptions had been dispelled. At the same time, it was determined that the students’ ECCT scores at the end of the activities showed a significant increase from their pretest levels.

No abstract

The purpose of this study is to adapt Scientific Attitude Inventory-II into Turkish and to examine its factor structure. The English and Turkish versions of the scale were tested out on the students in the Department of English Language Teaching (N=40) at Dokuz Eylul University a week apart and a high degree of correlation was found between the scores of the two applications. Then Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was conducted with the data collected from 292 students in order to examine the factor structure of the scale. Following the CFA, 12, 6, 3 and 1 factor structures did not fit the data. When Exploratory Factor Analysis was conducted with the same data set, it was determined that the items in the scale could be grouped under four factors. The scale was tested out on different 255 students and CFA was conducted again. After the CFA, the four-factor structure was found to be adequate fit with the data. Key words: confirmatory analyses, exploratory analyses, psychometric evaluation, scientific attitude inventory.