The aim of this study was to improve seventh grade students' problem solving skills through computer-based multiple representations. Hence, the research involved the design, implementation, and validation of an ILE, EmekÖlçer, a problem solving skills improvement program, prepared by the researcher. The program uses multiple approaches including graphics, symbolic, and audio representations. A review of previous research noted the difficulties of word problem solving in mathematics. It also showed the value and importance of multiple external representations that extend students' thinking styles and serve as a framework while problem processing. The advantage of computer-based environment containing multiple representations, providing teachers to prepare curriculum, and students to manipulate environment directly were issues derived from he theory. The specific context of the research was that of work and pool problems. The research was pre-post test intact group design. A pre-test containing numerical solutions, symbolic, and schematic modes for each problem was administered to 80 students from public and private secondary schools. Twenty-seven students were selected according to their achievement scores and were allowed to use the software, EmekÖlçer, for about four hours. Following the study, a post-test similar to the pre-test was administered to the students to investigate the validation of the software. The results indicated that the post- test mean score was significantly higher than the pre-test mean scores for each mode ( < .05). Therefore, it was concluded that computer based instruction rich in multiple representations improved students' performance and provided them with cognitive tools to develop problem-solving skills. The study was concluded with some recommendations for further research.

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the implementation process in a 'Science Education-Target Analysis' graduate course at Fatih Faculty of Education of Karadeniz Technical University. The course was carried out with 23 physics, chemistry and science education graduate students. Students completed six homework projects during the course. Data were collected through a questionnaire and written analyses of projects. The questionnaire consisted of two parts: The first part included background information. The second part consisted of three open-ended questions that assessed the student difficulties while they were working on the projects. A total of six projects were assessed through using 20 different criteria. Each item in the criteria was assigned 5 points for reflecting intended objectives, 2.5 points for reflecting partially intended objectives and 0 point for reflecting false objectives or unprepared projects. Differences between groups (i.e., physics, chemistry, and science education) were investigated by one-way analysis of variance and Tukey post- hoc analyses. Results showed that the achievement scores of the physics, chemistry, and science education groups were approximately 78 %, 84 %, and 92 %, respectively. Furthermore, a significant difference was found between the physics and science education students ( < .05). An important result of the study was that most of the intended objectives of the course were achieved. Recommendations regarding the course implementation for lecturers, researchers, and teachers are provided.

Educators and teachers are thirsty for new technologies and information and trying to gain competitive advantage in the world. Nowadays, the internet is redefining the ways of inquiring knowledge. Internet is the cheapest and the easiest way to reach knowledge, which makes the biggest difference between the developed countries and the others. Internet provides unlimited information sources and, also, gives opportunity to save and share the knowledge. In this respect, teachers who educate next generations should be comfortable with internet. Education managers may not create or choose specific courses for trainers, but they can select which online providers and programs meet their aims and standards. Because, internet visualizes the vocational knowledge and applications, it also provides multimedia environments, virtual reality opportunities, animations, and simulations. This paper describes the ways of utilizing internet and explains how teachers benefit from it. For this purpose, the following issues are discussed: In-service education and life long learning opportunities; using internet for instruction programs; internet based education; distance learning via internet; electronic journals (e-journals); and electronic information sources.

In the last decade, many studies related to education have been implemented in Turkey. While majority of these studies concentrated on the assessment of current implementations regarding the teaching-learning process and effective teaching learning, the examination of a science classroom environment has not received much attention. Modern education approaches suggest ways about how students reach the knowledge and how current technologies are used in teaching-learning process. In order to integrate the new approaches into the current teaching-learning process, it becomes necessary to reorganize the current classroom environment. Although there were many studies investigating the use of technology in education, there have been a few that concerned the properties of a modern science classroom necessary to implement the current learning theories and educational technology. The aim of this study was (a) to develop standards for a modern science classroom and (b) to determine whether the current classrooms were suitable for the active learning environment. In the present study, data were collected through an assessment scale measuring the properties of a modern science classroom. The scale was used to assess the learning environments of six elementary schools in Trabzon and three science-art centers for gifted children in Trabzon, Bayburt, and Sinop. Results indicated that, on average, public schools received 35 points and science-art centers received 97 points out of 120 points. Results also showed that elementary school children have not reached a sufficient level in terms of physical conditions of an accepted standard in a modern science classroom. Even if we accept the philosophy of active teaching-learning approaches, the current science classrooms do not allow us to put these new approaches into practice. In conclusion, just developing innovative teacher education programs, teaching-learning practices, educational technology, or curriculum is not enough by itself. The classroom environment should be arranged to accommodate these innovative approaches.

The -MUT- is an objective and rational questionnaire. It is based on the cognitive theory of moral development of Kohlberg. The MUT measures moral judgment as a core element of a democratic personality. The individual's capacity to reflect one's intuitively gained opinion on the basis of autonomously selected moral principles is an essential precondition of democratic decision making. As “moral actions” and “moral attitudes” cannot be defined on pure cognitive or motivational criteria, the MUT purposes to measure both cognitive and affective aspects of moral judgment simultaneously but as distinguished. The test has been validated in ten different languages and includes three factors: The stages, the dilemmas, and pros and Cons. The present validity study of the Turkish version of the test (MUT-TR) was done using the scores of 461 subjects. The results showed its validity on the Turkish sample. It is concluded that the instrument is useful and valuable means to rationally and objectively measure moral judgment and democratic personality.

This study investigated the teachers' roles in the teaching of elementary school history course in relation to the social studies curriculum in Turkish schools. The methodological design of the study was both quantitative and qualitative. Two hundred nineteen elementary teachers in Istanbul and Samsun, in Turkey, completed several questionnaires. In addition, seven teachers and three principles were interviewed. Observations took place in three 4th and three 5th grade elementary classrooms and lasted three weeks. Analysis of the data found that there were gaps between teachers' espoused child-centered curriculum theories and their classroom practices. Teachers preferred whole class teaching techniques as the means of delivering the curriculum. The curriculum itself was too broad and too knowledge-based. From the analysis of interview data and Turkish curriculum documents, the study argued that the teachers could be classified as national utopians and utilitarian/instrumentalist in their perceptions of elementary education, which affected their teaching styles. The analysis of video-tape data showed that teachers used three main teaching styles. On the basis of a further classification teachers were grouped as lecturers,controlles of proxy teaching/listeners, and questioners. The teachers thought that they were experts in the teaching of literacy and numeracy and argued that subject specialty was only to be considered in other areas of the curriculum. The study has implications for the process of educational change beyond the teaching of history. It focused on issues of curriculum and practice in Turkish elementary schools by analyzing the factors affecting teachers' perceptions of curriculum policy and their own practices. The present study investigated each of these areas and presented the implications for policy, theory, practice, and research by concluding that the starting point for a rational educational policy should be partnership with teachers. Therefore, the study argues that teachers must be included in research projects and that such projects need to use a variety of techniques based on classroom practice, (e.g. interview analysis, observation techniques, document analysis, case studies and action research) explored and evaluated throughout the study.

This study examined the differences in job satisfaction in terms of organizational job satisfaction factors between primary school teachers and junior high school teachers. The data were collected from a sample of 221 teachers in 33 schools in the city of Malatya-Turkey. A job satisfaction questionnaire developed by the researcher was used to collect the data. The questionnaire asked the participants to rate their job satisfaction related to the organizational satisfaction factors -work itself, management and supervision, salary, promotion, education, training and advancement opportunities, working conditions, and interpersonal relations. The data were analyzed by t-test for equality of means and analysis of variance followed by Tukey's HSD post hoc analyses. Differences were not statistically significant between the level of the satisfaction of primary and junior high school teachers. However, all teachers rated the lowest job satisfaction in salary and the highest interpersonal relations. Male teachers rated more satisfaction than female teachers in management and supervision, salary and working conditions. Older teachers rated more than younger ones in salary and working conditions. Teachers with more seniority rated working conditions as better than teachers with less seniority. As a result of these findings, salary, working conditions, interpersonal relations, promotion, management and supervision, education, training, and advancement opportunities were found to affect the teachers' job satisfaction. Suggestions were put forward to improve these conditions that affect teachers' satisfaction at work.

Gottfredson's theory is one of the more applied theories in the field of vocational goal construction. This theory is presented and discussed in terms of its fundamental concepts:Self - conpet,occupational perception, cognivite map of,preference,occupational accessibilitiy and compromise process, votiononal choice,and occupational aspiration. Self-concept and its re- lation in the vocational decision-making developed by Super include past and future as well as social and psychological aspects of the individual such as gender, social status, intelligence, interest, and values. Occupational perception is a term related to individuals' description of different occupations and includes occupational types, social order, and occupational fields. Cognitive map of is a specific term in Gottfredson's theory that is based on three parameters: gender specificity of the occupation, social order, and activity. Vocational preference is as a result of a comparison between self-concept and vocational self-concept. In this view, an individual inclines towards occupations that he/she finds related to his/her self-concept and rejects the one that are unrelated to the self-concept. Moreover, occupational accessibility indicates the degree of the difficulty in entering a particular occupation since not all occupations are in the same level of difficulty. The concept of vocational choice is also a result of a comparison between the idealistic and realistic tendencies. The critiques of Gottfredson's theory assert that the theory has not gone under a meticulous scrutiny and there is not much experimental support for its validity.

The purpose of this study was to compare the elements of curriculum design (i.e. objectives, behaviors, content, learning opportunities, and evaluation) according to identified questions for topics and units on chemistry in the Primary School Science Curriculum Design published in 1992 and 2000. Questions that can be grouped separately according to elements of curriculum design are shown below: Objectives:Are objective sentences suitable?Are objective sencentes clear and understandable? and Are objectives arraged from simple to complex according to taxonomy of cognivite, affectivite, and psychomotor domains?Behaviors:Are bebavios appropriate with quality of objectives?Are bebavioral sencentes clear and understandable,Do bebaviors have one simple quality?and are they arrenged from simple to complex according to taxonomoy of coqnivite,affective,and pyschomotor domains? Content:İs knowledgein the content important,valid and sustainable?Is content arranged according to taxonomy principles?and Does content have definivite headings?Learning opportunities:Are there any activities in-class and out-cals to attain the objectives in units and help student gain the identified behaviors?Is there an instruction method to teach subjects? Do learning opportunities make instruction productive?and Are there necesseary instruction matirials and equinpment to attain objectives of units and help student qain the identified behaviors? Evaluation:Are there any sample questions and evaluation methods used to determine objectives of topic and units which students gained?and Are activites to evaluate the elemments of curriculum design? In the light of the findings, Primary School Science Curriculum Design 2000 has been studied to find out whether it has any deficiencies present in the design of 1992..

Starting from the beginning of the 19th century, Turkey has gone through a total modernization process. In this process, in addition to its social, cultural, and political impacts, Turkish Reform, caused several changes in the field of education. Especially after the 1977-78 Ottoman-Russian War, a new cultural Turkism point of view started becoming popular in place of the traditional Ottoman view. The second Constitutional Period was an important historical point in the modernization of Turkey. Changes occurred in this period showed their influences in the educational curriculum and the textbooks. The Turkish Revolution, starting with the Turkish Independence War and continuing through the Republican period, gave a radical momentum to those modernization movements in education. Changes were based on two the basic principles: nationalism and secularism. These two principles influenced history programs and textbooks. When Turkism in the Second Constitutional Period left its place to Kemalist nationalism, Islam was reinterpreted due to secularism principle of the government. It is important to stress that there was no conflict between the religion of Islam and Republic; on the contrary, there were lot of similarities between them. History textbooks and curriculum in the first years of Turkish Republic had several important characteristics. For example, in one of the textbooks, according to the principle of starting from the most recent and going backwards in history, when it covered the history of Turkey, in order to convey the nationalism point of view, the books included several war scenes. Such dramatic scenes might have had negative influences in children's psychological development. However, it may be argued that such instances may not be so unusual for a nation that recently went through several major wars. After the 1930s, other major changes occurred in the history textbook and curriculum with the influence of Turk History Thesis.

Constructivism has become one of the widely used concepts by various science educators during the recent years. It is an epistemology, a theory of knowledge used to explain how we know what we know. Constructivism emphasizes learning, not teaching, and claims that learners will interpret information in the context of their own experiences. In the present paper, information about constructivist theory is given and, particularly, the theory's application in measurement and evaluation is investigated. Constructivist theory is investigated in terms of its evaluation goals, methods, criteria, and examination types used by constructivists. Constructivist evaluation implies that an appraisal or value judgment on a student's performance should be relative to pre-established criteria. There are two general types of methods in constructivist measurement: structural measurement/evaluation and process -oriented messurement / evaluation.In both types, some of the cri- teria are goal-free evaluation,autbentic tasks,knowledge construction,context-dependent (learning) evaluation,multiple perspectives,multimodal,and socially constructed(negotiated) meaning.In addition, examinations that are based on constructivist theory include more open-ended questions, personal interviews, and developmental checklists. Finally, a knowledge map is proposed about constructivist measurement and evaluation.

After the World War II, when we came to 1950s, the necessity of the friendship between France-Germany in order to establish peace in Europe was realized. It was hypothesized that such kind of a friendship would be the core of Europe's coming together. As a result of these ideas, the European Coal and Steal Consortium (ECSC) was established on April 18, 1951. Since then, the project, called European Union (EU), have been progressed and reached to the date. In the establishment of the European Economic Consortium, because the difficulty of reaching any political outcome was realized, economical outcomes have been given the priority. Because of the aforementioned reasons, policies related to education did not receive much attention. However, later realized was that educational policies had the utmost importance in order to reach any political and/or economical outcomes. Especially, starting from 1970s, educational policies have been established on educational cooperation, vocational education, foreign language education, and so on. Programs and activities around these issues have been organized. After Common Market,one of the economic aspects of the project, had become effective in 1992, the Union put one more step forward and accepted the Maastricht Agreement, specifically related to political aspects of the Union, in November 1993. In this agreement includes policies regarding education. Moreover, the concept called European Citizenship was put forward in this agreement. Accumulating the experiences of the previous projects, all projects were unified under the programs called Socrates,Leonarda Da Vinci and Youth for Europe. In these programs, it was explained that education was an important aspect in the European integration. Such programs have been revised time to time and are still continuing. In the present study, on the one hand, the evolution of EU is discussed and, on the other hand, the role of education in this process is summarized and discussed.

This study presents the effect of a constructivist approach on the students ofstudents' cognitive and affective learning in a social studies course on the elementary school. Observationsat elementary school level. Observational and experimental method were used in this study. This study was used onmethods were used in the study. The study included four groups (two groups from public schools and two groups from private schools) in Karadeniz Ereğli in 2000-2001 fall semester. In experimental groups students in public and private(Turkey) during the fall of 2000. In the school were an active and constructivist. The data was analyzed by MANCOVA and observations' code withexperimental groups, students were provided an active and a constructivist environment, while students in the control group were provided traditional lecture format. The data were analyzed by MANCOVA. Observations were recorded using a digital video camera. As a result of this study, inResults showed that in the experimental group, public school students' attitudes toward social studies and their achievementsexposed to constructivist approach were different from students'the control group students. Similar effect was found on the private school group. In both experimental groups, attitudes toward social studiesand achievement exposed to traditional approach. The results of the private school were the same the public school. Attitudes toward social studies of experimental group students in public school were significant higher from the other groups ( <0,05). In addition, achievements of the experimental group students in private school were significant higher from the other groups ( <0,05).were significantly higher ( < .05). In addition, the achievement of the private school, experimental group was significantly higher than the other groups ( < .05). As a result of the observations, constructivist class was coded as follows:classes were classified into facilitate, control, group, active students, prepared of different materials (poem, transparencies, computer CDs, jic saw maps, puzzles), research, investigation, practice, cooperation, teacher is a guide, student is a teacher, reinforcement, construct, question- answer, pleasant, repeat, whole participation, portfolious.different categories. Suggestions were given for further research.