This study aimed to profile students' information technology use and compare the levels of reading comprehension of 1150 eight graders from the public and private schools of metropolitan cities in Turkey. The findings indicated (p < .05) that (1) the rate of students who were using computers at home to assist their learning of curricular domains is very small, even at a negligible level, (2) more than 50% of the eight graders do have an access to a computer and one out of four students have the internet connection at home, (3) although more than half of the sample has a computer at home, the utilization of word processing, paint/drawing, or spreadsheet is not common. Further, results showed that students who had an access to the Internet scored higher on reading comprehension than students who did not have such an access. Similarly, the second comparison based upon having or not having a computer at home indicated that students having a computer scored higher. The paper suggested ways of developing reading comprehension skills and using internet facilities in schools.

This study explores the importance of epistemic beliefs in hypertext reading and learning from the hypertext. The rapid developments in the field of Internet technologies, and the attempts to integrate the Internet and hypermedia into educational settings cause many concerns and create new issues for educators to explore. Since students as learners and readers are exposed to more and a greater variety of content from the computer screens, their approach to this medium creates a need to design better environments to promote knowledge acquisition and successful hypertext reading processes. A recent hypertext design theory makes an important contribution to our understanding of this very issue by incorporating the importance of learners' epistemic beliefs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss these assumptions, mainly focusing on the role of epistemic beliefs in knowledge construction processes from the Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT) standpoint. The reviewed literature suggests that reading in hypertext is different from paper- reading and readers tend to transfer their traditional epistemic beliefs to hypertext environments. As far as learning from the hypertext is concerned, they tend to look for new models. Their epistemic beliefs are also observed to affect their learning processes. Overall, the implications of the current research suggest researchers reconsider readers' and learners' epistemic beliefs into the process of hypertext design.

There is a growing international consensus on the importance of human rights education in order to raise consciousness about the issue and to promote a democratic culture. The United Nations and other international organizations encourage member countries to establish a national plan of action to promote education in human rights. Turkey has taken an important step by formulating its National Plan of Action in human rights education in 1999 and introducing 'Citizenship and Human Rights Education' courses in all primary and secondary level schools. The school textbooks, however, have many deficiencies. Among them, the paper focuses on the lack of appropriate educational materials that could lead to attitudinal and behavioral changes in current textbooks and proposes several lesson scenarios for textbook authors.

Modular approach, when compared with traditional methods, presents a more flexible learning environment, makes students more active, lets them learn at their own pace by giving them the opportunity of making choices among alternatives, and gives the opportunity of self-evaluation. This study aimed at determining students' views on the efficiency of modular teaching. The study was conducted at the Faculty of Technical Education in Fırat University. The subjects of the study were the first year students who were enrolled in English course. There are 280 students in the study. It was found that students adopted modular teaching approach, benefited learning packages, found Learning Resources Center as a useful place to study English and gained confidence by using English teaching modules. The students stated that modular teaching should be used in other courses as well.

Color is a concept which has been learned since childhood, either in daily life or in school. This research aims to determine if there is an integrative function of science lessons which can help students perceive a common concept of color, what the students' ideas about color are, and how acceptable these ideas are and what difficulties the students face. In this research, the basis of thoughts that creates the color concept in students' minds has been investigated by performing semi-structured interviews. In this research, the researcher also played the role of interviewer and was sensitive to analogies which the students made between various concepts. These thoughts have been evaluated taking into account the differences seen in Newton's treatise named Optics, 1705 and Goethe's treatise named Theory of colors, 1810.

The purpose of this research was to identify the expectations of parents from private and public primary classroom teachers and to determine how well teachers satisfy these expectations. A survey was administered to 195 parents (80 private and 115 public school parents). A vast majority of the both groups expected teachers to be loving, understanding, and compassionate. There were low expectations about teachers' professional characteristics in both parent groups. While the public school parents expected that teachers establish continuing communication, private school parents expected teachers to behave sincerely and objectively. A majority of both groups have voiced opinions of satisfaction related to their expectations.

One of the most important concepts in chemistry is the particulate nature of matter. In this study it is aimed to investigate science student teachers' understandings and misunderstandings of the particulate nature of matter. To achieve this an open-ended test with three questions was developed and implemented to 190 students in their second year in the Science Division of Fatih Faculty of Education at Karadeniz Technical University in 2001-2002 academic year. Students' responses were analyzed in detail and classified in sound understanding (SU), partial understanding (PU), specific misconcepti- on(SM), no understanding (NU), and no response (NR) categories. The ratio of students' responses in SU, PU and SM categories are in the range of 16-18%, 37-53%, and 16-24%, respectively.

This article discusses school bullying, which sometimes occurs among schoolchildren, aiming to raise pupils', teachers', administrators', and parents' awareness of the problem. Within this framework, the definition, characteristics, frequency and types of school bullying, relation of bullying to sex and age, the negative effects of bullying on pupils, characteristics of bullies, victims, and bully/victims, the risk places at schools and the response of school staff to bullying are all examined. Finally, strategies to prevent bullying problems at schools are suggested. This work is based on a review of theliterature and because of the limited number of publications on the subject in Turkish, mostly work written in English is referred to.

Traditionally, problem solving is viewed as the application of learnt facts to solve a series of word problems. In contrast to this view, current view of problem solving emphasizes the necessity of seeing problem solving as a medium for teaching and learning of mathematics. In this paper, how elementary school mathematics textbooks approach to problem solving is investigated. The results of the study showed that these textbooks displayed the traditional view of problem solving. In this view, mathematical concepts and skills are considered as prerequisites for problem solving. In these textbook, first, mathematical concepts are taught and then applied for solving word problems. The implications of the study for textbook selection and teacher education are disscussed.