A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EARTH SCIENCE EDUCATION IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN TURKEY AND IN THE USA

Research in education gives initiatives to countries evaluate and modify their curriculum. Large-scale international assessments such as TIMSS usually inspire these curriculum reforms by that countries compare the results of large-scale assessments with other countries' scores. Domestic practices also need to be considered for the educational reforms because domestic practices can picture education systems very clearly that international studies might not be able to detect. To make better curriculum decisions both the domestic practices and the large-scale international assessments need to be evaluated together. As a result, local implementations of specific content might be very informative to improve the curriculum of other countries. The purpose of the current study is to compare earth science education in Turkey and in the USA in elementary school levels and identify the characteristics of the instructional practices in order to make suggestions to improve earth science education.