The Scale for Determining the Views of Primary School Students about the Existence Domain of Scientific Knowledge
Keywords:
Science education, scientific knowledge (epistemology), existence domain of scientific knowledge (ontology), philosophy of science.Abstract
The purpose of this research is to develop a reliable and valid instrument in order to determine the primary school students’ views towards the existence domain of scientific knowledge. A total of 467 students attending to 6th, 7th and 8th grades from 5 different primary schools were participated in the study. It was identified that the instrument was composed of totally 15 items with five factors namely, scientific works and entities (4 items), the true correspondence of scientific works (4 items), the scientific entities (3 items), continuity of the entities (2 items) and reaching the reality (2 items). The instrument has a reliability coefficient of cronbach ?=0.75. At the same time, this instrument is also an original one developed for determining the primary school students’ views about the existence domain of scientific knowledge in Turkey.