STUDENTS’ VIEWS OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY IN A CREATIVE DRAMA ACTIVITY

One of the most important objectives of the science education includes helping students to think about the nature of scientific inquiries like a scientist and keep this point of view in order to understand the events occurring around them. This research aims to (1) compare secondary school students' views -who have creative drama & conventional education- about scientific inquiry, (2) and whether the experimental and control group students' views about scientific research differ depending on gender after process. Pre-experimental design with control group was used in this research. The sample of this research consisted of 130 students of 6th grade secondary school in Samsun, Turkey. The data were collected by using VOSI-E questionnaire. Data collected with VOSI-E were analyzed using grouping standards, and students were classified as novice, transition and expert. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and nonparametric chi-square test. Research results show that when compared to conventional activities in terms of developing positive views about scientific inquiry, creative drama activities lead higher number of students to expert level. Also, it was found out that the number of students in expert category in experimental group was higher than those in control group at the end of education process.