Comparison of Turkish pre-service science teachers and secondary school students within the scope of natural history topics

Abstract

Natural history includes the period from the formation of the Earth to recent times and all the changes it has gone through throughout this vast period. The biggest challenge in understanding natural history is the age of the Earth. Even though natural history is quite difficult to understand, pre-service science teachers are expected to be knowledgeable about this matter to a fundamental degree. Therefore, this study aims to determine the knowledge levels of secandary school students and pre-service science teachers on some natural history topics and compare compare these two groups in this context. . To conduct such research in which a qualitativenatured case study design was used, the data obtained through 15 open-ended questions were analyzed through content analysis. As a result, percentages of correct answers regarding the time perception component were quite low both for secaondary students and pre-service science teachers. While both groups were close in the component of the transformation of the Earth, it was founden that students answered more questions correctly. As expected, pre-service teachers correctly answered more questions regarding the component of diversity of living things than the students.