Determining Levels of 8th Grade Students of Secondary School to Understand Cognitive Structures and Concepts Concerning Concepts of Fundamental Citizenship

Purpose of this study is to determine cognitive structures, conceptual knowledge and misconceptions of the 8th grade students concerning concepts of citizenship through a word association test. In direction of this purpose, a word association test consisting of democracy, sovereignty, independency, freedom, right and responsibility concepts have been applied to 175 8th grade students who studied at 3 secondary schools in Trabzon province during 2017-2018 school years. Conceptual networks have been formed in direction of responses of the students to these concepts, and cognitive structures of the students have been demonstrated. It has been concluded as a result of the study that students associate concept of democracy mostly with equality, right, justice concepts. They associate concept of sovereignty with freedom, nation, independence concepts and concept of independency with freedom, flag and liberty concepts. They also associate concept of freedom with independency, justice, liberty concepts and concept of right with freedom, nation and sovereignty concepts. They associate again concept of responsibility with task, duty and work concepts. It has been determined as a result of the study that a good part of the students can make sentences involving scientific information about freedom, independency and responsibility concepts and they have no misconceptions about these concepts. It has been determined that a limited number of students have misconceptions about the concept of right. As for one of the important results of the study, most of the students have misconceptions about the concept of sovereignty