Evaluation of the Cognitive Structures of the Middle School Students about the Concept of "Water Pollution" by Using Free Word Association Test

Abstract

It is necessary to focus on environmental education at every stage of education in order to raise the awareness of the students about the environment and make the information permanent. Before setting priorities for educational policy and taking precautions, necessary studies relating the determining the views of the students should be performed. Herein, the objective of our study which is about water pollution, an important issue in environmental problems, is to determine the current conceptual situations of the 8^th grade middle school students about the key concept of "water pollution" and to determine the misconceptions about this subject if they have. The data of the research were collected by using free word association test from 60 students (34 of them are girls and 26 of them are boys) studying at Saraçoğlu Habibe Yılmaz Middle School in Karatay-Konya/Turkey. A case study pattern from the qualitative research methods was used in the study. While analyzing the data by using the content analysis approach, frequencies and percentages of categorized answer words were calculated. The words obtained are grouped into 5 categories as; "Factors causing water pollution", "The effects of water pollution on living things", "Possible effects of water pollution", "Concepts related to water" and “Natural sources where water pollution takes place”. It is seen that the information of the students about the factors causing the water pollution and the answer words they wrote about the water pollution are sufficient but some expected words (such as; “prevention of environmental pollution” etc.) could not be remembered by students and they have some information gaps on this subject. In addition, sample sentences that students wrote about the key concept of "water pollution" were examined. Although the sentences containing scientific information are relatively common, it has also been identified that there are some sentences with no scientific qualities or with misconceptions.

Keywords: Environmental problem, Water pollution, Free Word Association Test, Cognitive structure.