Biology student teachers’ ideas about purpose of laboratory work

Participants
A total of 82 biology students from the Ahmet Kelesoglu Education Faculty of Selcuk University in Turkey, who were studying to become secondary school biology teachers, participated in this study. The average age of the students was 22.1 years old (range 19–26). The majority of the students were female (53 of 82). However, this study did not focus on gender differences. The participants are graduate students who have carried out the application of many theoretical biology lessons in the laboratory. The study was conducted in October 2009.

Data Collection
In order to establish the ideas of the student teachers regarding the purposes of laboratory work in biology teaching, each individual was asked to respond to the following open-ended question: “Each day, the importance of laboratory work in secondary school biology teaching is understood better. However, whether teachers understand the importance and purposes of laboratory work is a subject for discussion. In your opinion, what are the purposes of laboratory work in biology teaching? Please explain.” The participants were given approximately 15 minutes to write down the purposes of laboratory work. As the intent was to understand the first purposes to come to the minds of the student teachers, this timeframe was considered sufficient. The open-ended question above is the basic data source for this study.

Data Analysis
During the first stage, the 82 student teachers were asked to write down the purposes of laboratory work. However, only 79 of these participants wrote down valid purposes. The responses of the remaining three participants were not included, because these participants focused on the general purposes of biology teaching rather than the purposes of laboratory work. Therefore, data analysis was done on the 79 papers. The analysis and interpretation of the answers given by the student teachers to the open-ended question were conducted in four stages. First, the written responses were read in detail to establish the general level, and it was seen that there was a very wide spectrum of purposes for laboratory work. Second, the “content analysis technique” (Yildirim & Simsek, 2005) was used to separate each purpose into its components and analyzed for similarities or common factors with other purposes. The purposes defined by the student biology teachers were investigated, and the 79 papers were culled. Based on the written responses of the student biology teachers, the main purpose categories for laboratory work were established. Third, each purpose was placed in an appropriate category. Lastly, the number of participants (n) and the percentage (%) representing each of the 12 main categories made up of 235 purposes were calculated. Many studies have shown this type of data analysis technique provides reliable results (Hirvonen & Viiri, 2002; Sahin-Pekmez et al., 2005)