Abstract:

Students’ pre-existing conceptions about science topics should be taken into consideration when preparing course content. Cloning is an important issue in the context of biological literacy; but the information about cloning in the media is usually unscientific. In this study, secondary school students’ pre-existing conceptions about cloning were examined. To this end, semi-structured interviews were carried out with six 11th grade students, and qualitative content analysis was done. Consequently, various student notions about cloning were determined. Students thought that cloning is producing a copy of a living thing and they had difficulty in explaining cloning in general. It was common among students to think that clones are only artificially produced by humans. Moreover, four thinking patterns were determined as a result of the research, namely, “Genetic Determinism”, “Effect of Gene and Environment Together”, “Cloning as a Reproduction Technology”, and “Cloning as Genetic Engineering”. The deterministic view about genes has been observed to shape students' thoughts about clones. It was seen that students’ conceptions about cloning were especially influenced by informal resources such as the Internet, science-fiction movies, or social media. Based on the conceptions obtained as a result of the research, suggestions were made about the teaching of cloning.

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