Abstract:

Educating people and ensuring that they behave consciously is very important in preventing air pollution. The teaching process applied in schools has an important role in developing students' cognitive structures and environmental awareness. Therefore, determining the cognitive structures of individuals on environmental problems including air pollution plays an important role in determining the road map to be followed for environmental education. This study, it is aimed to determine the cognitive structures and misconceptions of 8th-grade students related to the concepts of “air pollution”. A free word association test (WAT) was used to obtain the data. "Air pollution" was determined as a keyword when creating the WAT. The answer words written by students about the given key concept were examined and grouped and their frequencies were calculated. Concepts that were repeated more than one were included in the groups and the concepts which were not included in groups were given separately. The answer words written by students appear to be concentrated in the "Causes of Air Pollution" and "Atmospheric Effects of Air Pollution" categories. Other categories with low-frequency values are; “Effects of Air Pollution on Living Things and Environment” and “Defining Air Pollution”. Also, in the study, the sentences were written by students related to the key concept of “air pollution” were examined and these sentences were classified as sentences containing scientific knowledge, sentences without scientific quality, and sentences including misconception. In addition to the sentences containing scientific information, it is also seen that students wrote sentences that do not have scientific quality and include misconception.

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