Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

Concepts are the abstract representatives of those classifications created by objects, events, ideas and behaviors which have some similar or common traits. Individuals think through concepts while they are thinking. The richer relations have the concepts with each other, the richer will thinking process is. Therefore, developing concepts is an important part for education. Social Sciences have a great role in developing concepts. The aim of this study is to find out how one can associate some citizenship concepts of social sciences classes with those of related with them. For this purpose, government, citizenship, democracy, constitution, state, election and public concepts, which are planned to be developed through Social Studies Curriculum for 4-7 graders, have been selected. In this research single crosshatching model has been used among general crosshatching models. In order to achieve the goal of the study, a word association test developed through the topic, has been applied to 181 8th grader students. The achieved data has been analyzed in terms of percentage and frequency of the concepts. Concepts which have breakpoints above 60, 50, 40 and 30, have been associated with mind maps. At the end of the research, mind maps of the students upon citizenship concepts have been deducted and it has been concluded that they have some misunderstandings about public, state and government concepts. It has also been understood that the concept of citizenship could not been associated with other concepts. Apart from this, it has been seen that concepts like prime-minister, president, right, liberty and TGNA (Turkish Grand National Assembly) have come into prominence. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.