Exploring fifth–grade Turkish children’s solutions and future plans for environmental pollution through their drawings

This study explored the characteristics of 5th grade children’s solutions and future plans for environmental pollution in their drawings. It found that these solutions and plans were affected by the children’s conception of pollution. Many children were familiar with littering around them. Therefore, they used this drawing activity mainly to present their solutions and plans for littering. One way to improve children’s understanding of this issue may be to use an instruction based on socio-scientific issues (SSI) in the classroom. Sadler (2011) describes SSI as science related controversial social issues, and states that:

‘they are open-ended problems without clear-cut solutions; in fact, they tend to have multiple plausible solutions. These solutions can be informed by scientific principles, theories, and data, but the solutions cannot be fully determined by scientific considerations. The issues and potential courses of action associated with the issues are influenced by a variety of social factors including politics, economics, and ethics. SSI may be global in nature such as climate change and the use of genetic technologies or local such as addressing a neighborhood environmental crisis or determining the location of a new power plant’ (p. 4).

During SSI instruction, children learn about pollutants and their impacts on the environment as they produce solutions and plans for an open-ended problem. SSI may prove to be an effective way of teaching all forms of environmental pollution with its unique emphasis on their solutions.

It appears that the analytical framework developed by Erdogan (2009) is useful for analysing children’s solutions and plans for pollution. More studies are needed to better understand the characteristics of these solutions and plans at different grades. Although drawings are useful tools to achieve this aim, they have certain limitations and should be used in conjunction with other research tools, such as interviews.