Browsing by Author "Karahan, Engin"

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    Case Studies of Secondary School Teachers Designing Socioscientific Issues-Based Instruction and Their Students’ Socioscientific Reasoning
    (2015-05) Karahan, Engin
    Addressing socioscientific issues (SSI) has been one of the main focuses in science education since the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement in the 1970s (Levinson, 2006); however, teaching controversial socioscientific issues has always been challenging for teachers (Dillon, 1994; Osborne, Duschl, & Fairbrother, 2002). Although teachers exhibit positive attitudes for using controversial socioscientific issues in their science classrooms, only a small percentage of them actually incorporate SSI content into their science curricula on a regular basis (Sadler, Amirshokoohi, Kazempour, & Allspaw, 2006; Lee & Witz, 2009). The literature in science education has highlighted the significant relationships among teacher beliefs, teaching practices, and student learning (Bryan & Atwater, 2002; King, Shumow, & Lietz, 2001; Lederman, 1992). Despite the fact that the case studies present a relatively detailed picture of teachers� values and motivations for teaching SSI (e.g. Lee, 2006; Lee & Witz, 2009; Reis & Galvao, 2004), these studies still miss the practices of these teachers and potential outcomes for their students. Therefore, there is a great need for in-depth case studies that would focus on teachers� practices of designing and teaching SSI-based learning environments, their deeper beliefs and motivations for teaching SSI, and their students� response to these practices (Lee, 2006). This dissertation is structured as three separate, but related, studies about secondary school teachers� experiences of designing and teaching SSI-based classes and their students's understanding of science and SSI reasoning. The case studies in this dissertation seek answers for (1) teacher's practices of designing and teaching SSI-based instruction, as well as its relation to their deeper personal beliefs and motivations to teach SSI, and (2) how their students respond to their approaches of teaching SSI in terms of their science understanding and SSI reasoning. The first paper presents case studies of three secondary science teachers within three high schools located along the Minnesota River Basin. The findings of this study documented the experiences of the participant teachers, as well as the contextual influences on those experiences. The second paper presents a case study of a science teacher and a social studies teacher which describes how these two teachers collaboratively designed and taught an environmental ethics class. The results of this study documented teacher's ways of sharing responsibilities, bringing their content and pedagogical expertise, and promoting the agency of their students in the environmental ethics class. The final paper in this dissertation presents case studies of secondary school students who were the participants in the SSI-based science classes described in the first two studies. The results of this study provided evidence for participant student's understanding of science and their socioscientific reasoning, as well as how they were influenced by the instructional decisions their teachers made.
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    Constructing media artifacts in a social constructivist learning environment to enhance students’ environmental awareness and activism.
    (2012-06) Karahan, Engin
    Current science education reforms and policy documents highlight the importance of social awareness and activism in solving environmental problems. “Environmental problems are socially constructed in terms of their conceptualized effects on individuals, groups, other living things and systems [. Thus,] research based on constructivist principles provides not only a coherent framework in which to theorize about learning, but also a context for understanding socially constructed issues and knowledge” (Palmer & Suggate, 2004, p. 208). This research study particularly investigated the impacts of two constructivism-based frameworks, constructionism and social constructivism, on students’ environmental awareness and activism, and their motivation and engagement. Students constructed media artifacts to reflect their knowledge, attitudes, awareness, and activism about environmental issues through a constructionist design process. Additionally, social networking technologies were integrated into the process to improve the effectiveness of the frameworks employed in this study. A convergent mixed methods design was implemented for this research to triangulate the methods by directly comparing and contrasting quantitative results with qualitative findings for corroboration and validation purposes. Twenty-two 10th to 12th graders were recruited from their environmental science class to participate in this study. The findings of the study indicated that students’ environmental awareness and activism were improved throughout the constructionist and social constructivist learning processes. In addition, constructionist and social constructivist methods and tools such as video designing activities and social networking website positively affected student motivation and engagement.