Abstract:

The purpose of this research is to reveal 5th-grade students cognitive structure regarding the natural disasters through the Word Association Test WAT , which is an alternative assessment technique. The study group of the research is composed of 223 5th-grade students who were attending at two elementary schools under the body of Directorate of National Education in the city center of Niğde. Six main concepts extreme snowfall, earthquake, landslide, flood, avalanche, erosion, drought, forest fire, and tsunami which are disasters were selected to form the test. According to the results of the study, of the disasters in the WAT, the key concepts avalanche, extreme snowfall, flood, forest fire, landslide, drought could be associated with several words by more than 100 students while tsunami, erosion, and earthquake did not take place within this range. It is seen that all the disasters were associated with “death” as one common word within the range of 20-39. This shows that when it came to natural disasters, the students associated them with the word death in the first place. Students also have been associated with the concept of erosion "land slip". This suggests that students have a misconception about the concept of erosion. It was concluded that word association tests are effective techniques to reveal cognitive structure and identify misconceptions

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