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Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 10, Issue 1, Article 10
(June, 2009) |
Findings revealed that teachers who work in private schools are able to form suitable environments for project work. State schools, on the other hand, suffer from lack of materials required for project work in physics. This shows that schools with their own budgets can support students’ project work. State schools do not have a budget, except for the money coming from the Ministry of National Education, which clearly is not enough to support students’ work. As a consequence, the reason for insufficient project work is due to the insufficient arrangement of the administration.
Findings also revealed that teachers in all types of schools generally let students decide which topic or problem to study on. In private schools, however, the teachers are more in control of deciding on the project topic. One of the reasons for this, as one of the teachers from the private school stressed, is that the private schools take the feasibility of the project into consideration during their teachers’ meeting.
At all stages and at all schools, teachers and students experience difficulties during project execution. In process of project work, science high school students experience difficulties in data gathering; they claim that their experimental skills are insufficient and they do not have the habit of doing research, planning a project and documenting the results. These results correspond the findings of Akdeniz and Devecioğlu (2001)’s study. The majority of the problems encountered during project work is a result of lack of students’ basic process skills, as they have not learned the skills required to do project work earlier in their education.
Findings from the participants’ suggestions about the appropriate use of project-based learning in secondary physics lessons revealed that in order to overcome the difficulties encountered “elective lessons aiming to teach executing a project work”, “collaboration with universities” and “forming science clubs at schools” are required.
In summary, project-based work is not generally used in secondary schools and so there are very few relevant studies. Thus, there is still a need to do more studies examining how project work is executed and barriers to doing project work in secondary school physics lessons. Since project-based work is crucial in physics lessons, students’ ability to execute project work needs to be improved. An elective course for this purpose might be very useful in this aspect in secondary schools. For the policy makers and school administrators, they need to arrange a close relationship and collaboration between schools and universities, especially to use laboratory facilities of local universities.
