Investigating Science Content and Cognitive Domain Scores with regard to Low - and High - Performing Schools in Turkey

TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) which is a project of IAE (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) was lastly conducted in 2011 and has drawn interest of many researchers with its fruitful data. 63 countries from all around the world participated TIMSS 2011 at fourth and eighth grade level. Turkey firstly participated this study in both fourth and eighth grade level at TIMSS 2011. Items in science achievement tests at both fourth and eighth grade levels in TIMSS are organized based on science content and cognitive domains. So, beside the average scores of the countries, TIMSS presents average scores with regard to science content and cognitive domains. Investigating the countries’ scores as a whole may trigger to overlook some detailed results which are very crucial for educational policy makers, school administrators, teachers, and students. In this study, school categories such as low-performing schools, medium-performing schools, and high performing schools were created to investigate Turkey’s results more deeply. IDB (International Database) Analyzer, which was developed by IAE for analyzing data from IEA’s large-scale assessments, was used to investigate the differences between low-performing schools, medium-performing schools, and high performing schools with regard to the students’ science content domain scores and their cognitive domain scores at both fourth and eighth grade levels in Turkey. In addition, the aforementioned school groups were examined with respect to the percentages of students who answered science items correctly. As a result of the analyses, it was found that in both fourth and eighth grade levels the earth science content domain scores relatively lower than the other domain scores for three categories of schools (low-, medium-, and high-performing school). In addition, surprisingly, the results revealed that fourth grade students’ average reasoning domain scores are higher than students’ both knowing and applying domain scores for three categories of schools. Moreover, the results revealed that even the students in high performing schools in Turkey have some difficulties to answer open-ended questions and reasoning items correctly at both fourth and eighth grade level in TIMSS 2011.