Muammer Çalik

The purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable scale to measure high school students’ creative personality of the topics “buffer solution and salt hydrolysis.” The draft version of creative personality scale (CPS) consisted of five dimensions (openness to experience, emotional sensitivity, divergent view, self-resilience, and social adaptability) with 30 items. A focus group discussion was conducted with five chemistry educators to ensure its content and face validity. Then, it was administered to a total of 331 high school students (aged 16-18 years) to carry out relevant statistical analyses. The confirmatory factor analysis verified five dimensions for 20 items. Also, the findings showed high content and construct (convergent and discriminant) validity, and high reliability. Further, the preliminary findings revealed that majority of high school students had a high creative personality level of the topics under investigation. The current study suggests that the CPS scale could be used to measure student’s specialized creative personality.

The main purpose of this study was to examine primary school students’ informal reasoning patterns and argumentation quality of “plastic wastes, highland tourism and hydroelectric power plant (HEPP)” socioscientific issues (SSIs). Through an embedded multi-case design of case study method, the sample of the study consisted of 30 students (10 for each grade), who were purposefully drawn from a state school in the city of Trabzon. Semi-structured interviews were conducted via three SSI-based cartoons. Students’ arguments were analyzed in regard to informal reasoning patterns (intuitive, emotional, and rational) while their quality was evaluated through argumentation analysis rubric. The findings showed that the students mostly used the emotional informal reasoning while making decisions on the foregoing SSIs. Also, it was found that the students’ informal reasoning patterns depended on type of the SSIs. For example, the students tended to use the emotional and rational informal reasoning for “plastic wastes” SSIs as compared with others. It can be concluded that an increase in grade level has diversified informal reasoning patterns and improved the quality of the students’ arguments. Further, this study reveals that SSI-based cartoons help them pose and freely depict their informal reasoning abilities and argumentation processes. Therefore, the current study recommends that future studies may encourage students to create and animate their own cartoons to improve their informal reasoning abilities and argumentation skills.

This study aimed to examine teachers’ dialogic discussions in applications of concept cartoons on socioscientific issues (SSICCs) and how these discussions developed high school gifted students’ decision-making competences and informal reasoning modes. Through multiple case design, this study viewed three teachers in Science and Art Center (SAC) as the cases. The teachers’ dialogic discussions were analyzed by using the Dialogic Inquiry Tool (DIT). The findings of multiple case analysis revealed that the teachers’ dialogic discussions ranged from the lowest dialogic level to weak level in the first weeks. Toward the end of the implementations, they demonstrated strong semi-dialogic level discussions. Likewise, high school gifted students evolved their decision-making competences from spontaneous decision-making level to the intermediate level of metareflection over time. This suggests that the teachers’ pedagogical improvements in dialogic discussions via SSICCs have positively impacted high school gifted students’ decision-making competences and informal reasoning modes. It can be concluded that an improvement in the teachers’ dialogic discussions via SSICCs has stimulated the students’ decision-making processes, which cover the use of the scientific evidence and multiple disciplines to form their informal reasoning modes. Thus, it is suggested that professional development programs should be developed and implemented to cultivate in-service teachers’ pedagogical competences at blending well-known educative tools (e.g., concept cartoons) with contemporary pedagogical strategies (e.g., dialogic discussion).

Systematic review and bibliometric analysis studies provide invaluable findings for researchers, teachers, and educational policymakers, but they do not use a standard criterion (e.g., Hedges’ g ) to objectively interpret the experimental studies exploring the effect(s) of early childhood science activities on science learning. Therefore, this study aimed to meta-analytically examine the effectiveness of early childhood science activities in promoting children’s scientific literacy. Through the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, the authors employed some keyword patterns (e.g., pattern 1: early childhood education, experimental and science education) to extract related studies from prominent and common educational databases (e.g., ERIC, Science Direct, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global, Scopus, Web of Science). After applying inclusion (e.g., kindergarten and preschool) and exclusion (e.g., pre-experimental design) criteria, the current meta-analysis handled 17 intervention studies (published between 2008 and 2023) ( k = 19) to compute the effect sizes throughout Comprehensive Meta-Analysis version 2 (CMA V2) software. The findings appeared the large effect (Hedges’ g = 0.891) for the mean effect size. Also, the findings of moderator variables pointed to non-significant differences at the nature of group ( Q value = 1.908, df = 1, p > 0.05), implementation duration ( Q value = 3.866, df = 2, p > 0.05), and type of intervention ( Q value = 5.687, df = 3; p > 0.05). Given the mean effect size, it can be concluded that alternative pedagogical activities, which are well designed and differentiated from regular ones, are more efficient at helping children develop their scientific literacy than conventional ones. Based on the findings of moderator variables, the current meta-analysis suggests outdoor learning activities and medium-term intervention for regular group with the same aged children to achieve a better scientific literacy. Finally, given the crucial role of early childhood science activities in promoting children’s scientific literacy, policymakers, curriculum developers, and teacher educators should collaboratively design related curricula to enhance their applicability, effectiveness, and fruitfulness.

Despite acknowledging the complementary role of chemical equilibrium-based pedagogical treatments on students’ academic performance, the related science education literature has not examined their practical effectiveness and significance via a meta-analysis method. Therefore, this study intends to meta-analytically explore their effectiveness in improving students’ academic performance. It included 55 studies (k) from 51 unique sources. The results of the meta-analysis showed that the overall effect-size (Hedges’ g = 1.028) fell into the large effect. This means that the treatments are more effective in enhancing students’ academic performance of chemical equilibrium than the controlled ones. Nevertheless, the variability in the effect-sizes revealed the importance of the treatment types and educational contexts. Also, the results indicated that the moderator variables were statistically non-significant ( p > 0.05) but categorically played a crucial role at predicting the students’ academic performance through the treatments. Given the descriptive findings, the current meta-analysis offers the following individual moderator levels to better teach and measure the topic “chemical equilibrium”: university (for educational level), inquiry-based learning (for type of treatment), open-ended question (for question type) and teacher (for practitioner). Of course, chemistry teachers and science educators should take into consideration the role of educational contexts in learning chemical equilibrium, while deciding the type of treatment to teach it.

Becoming reviewers is absolutely a volunteer process to ensure the credibility and reliability of any scientific/academic paper and requires them to spend their spare time to review and improve the quality of the submitted papers. Editors try to do their best to find qualified reviewers, who can provide timely and high quality feedback within the scheduled review period. An increase in the number of educational research journals calls for much more reviewers and increases their workloads with frequent invitations.

The related literature has included several versions of the scientific creativity survey but lacked its specialized version for grade 4 science curriculum. Therefore, this study aimed to specialize the scientific creativity survey for the subjects “our foods” and “human and environment” in grade 4 science curriculum. After determining the relevant keywords extracted from the scientific creativity literature and previous surveys, we developed subject-specific questions based on them. Later, a group of experts were asked (elementary teacher educators, science educators, elementary school teachers and science teachers) to check the survey’s content, applicability and understandability prior to pilot testing with the participants. Then, three successive pilot studies were conducted with different samples to identify its content validity and reliability. The findings showed significant differences for question-total correlation(s), and between the upper and lower groups. Further, its Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.857 in the first pilot study to 0.907 in the third pilot study. The present study concludes that the specialized scientific creativity survey is valid and reliable for the context (e.g., grade 4 and science course). Thus, it can be used to measure and evaluate grade 4 (aged 10 years) students’ scientific creativity and sub-dimensions (e.g., fluency, flexibility, and originality) of the subjects “our foods” and “human and environment.”