A Study Identifying Primary School Students’ Cognitive Structures: Safe Life

The purpose of this study is to identify primary school students’ cognitive structures of concepts in the unit “Safe Life” included in the 3rd-grade Life Studies Curriculum. The study used a survey research design. The participants consisted of primary school 3rd-grade students attending 3 schools in Istanbul. The data were collected using the Word Association Test; the students were asked to write down words evoked by key concepts about any subject in a certain period of time. In this regard, traffic, accident, emergency, danger, and playground were selected as key concepts from the unit “Safe Life” in the Life Studies Curriculum. A frequency table including the key concepts and student answers was created using the collected data. Concepts networks were formed to map the students’ cognitive structures of safe life through the cut-off point technique