Abstract:

Scientists need to teach scientific thinking starting from the primary school level in order to acquire the students of the scientific process skills called the skills the scientist uses in the study of nature. Therefore, the study aims to identify the level of scientific process skills of primary school students and to study the different variables in terms of the study. The study group, designed with the visual scan method, is composed of 1133 4th-class students (540 girls, 593 men) studying in the second semester of the 2017-2018 academic year. The "Scientific Process Skills Test" was developed by Smith and Welliver (1994) in order to collect data, adapted to the Turkish by Head and Sun (2006). In a test of 40 questions, 13 scientific process skills were observed. The test reliability ratio was 0.81. The average score of the students who participated in the study was 23.87. The evaluation of the test results found a significant difference in gender observation, classification, drawing out, prediction, recording data, establishing a number-space relationship, experimenting, determining variables, interpreting data and functional identification. According to the laboratory use in the course of science, there is no meaningful difference in the benefit of those who use the laboratory only in terms of observation skills. According to the experiment, the experimenters found significant differences in terms of classification, prediction, establishment of number-space relationship and interpretation of data. Those who are interested in non-learning have found a significant difference in their skill in terms of class. It is necessary to increase the activities and student participation in the courses in order to improve students' scientific process skills levels.