Investigation of 5th Grade Students’ Awareness about Chemical and Organic Fertilizers: An Action Research

The aim of this study was to investigate fifth grade students’ awareness about usages of chemical and organic fertilizers by adopting action research design. The participants of this study were 13 fifth grade middle school students in a private school in Usak city. A lesson plan which is appropriate to the objectives of soil pollution in the fifth-grade science curriculum was developed and revised after consulting with an expert in science education. This lesson plan was implemented for three hours. During the course, various learning strategies and techniques in addition to videos, animations and the activities which were designed for students in order to consider multiple perspectives of the context were used. Interview questions which were developed by the researchers were used as pre- and post-test and the change in students’ opinions were investigated. Moreover, semi-structured interviews by using the questions were conducted in order to get more insight about the change in students’ opinions. The results revealed that while students preferred organic fertilizers because of the factors as naturalness, usefulness and being harmless to environment and the living beings; they preferred to using chemical fertilizers because of the cheapness and appealing image of the products. After the course, all the students changed their ideas on behalf of using organic fertilizers and developed their ideas about organic products