The place of interdisciplinary relationships in science projects of the gifted students in Turkey

Abstract

IInstructional design is essential for human cognitive development, and interdisciplinary relationships of those settings have an important role on human cognition. Such instructional settings including various disciplines are current issues in educational researches. As seen in Turkish Science Education Curriculum (TSEC), some relationships between science and environment have been stated and emphasized for mental structures. Learning with projects can help to explore those mental processes. The gifted students can learn effectively and more rapidly than their fellows by the way of such interdisciplinary learning practices. Since these relationships in the curriculum provide the gifted students and the teachers making integrations with disciplines, the project based learning practices include various integrations. Therefore, this documentary study was conducted to student projects selected in a project competition carried out by the gifted students throughout Turkey to explore such interdisciplinary relationships. For the purpose of determining these relationships in student practices made by the Science and Art Centers’ (SAC) students accepted as gifted ones, a total of 76 projects were subjected to the content analysis. With the result of categorization process, they focused on two disciplines to overcome with their problems in general. They prefered to make relationships between firstly biology and chemistry and secondly biology and physics to find valuable answers to their daily life problems. They used the both disciplines’ topics more than other traditional area of science education called as physics. They could make less integrations on physics topics with other disciplines as compared with the connections made between biology and chemistry. Additionally, they could make only 4 connections with geology and geography. Although the 56 of the gifteds’ projects have an interdisciplinary viewpoint totally, only 20 of them include only one scientific disciplines. Such frequencies are important for PBL as it can be a way of coping with the integration problems doing the practices in gifted education spesificially and science education in general.

Keywords

• Gifted Students
• Interdisciplinary Relationships
• Project based learning
• Integrated disciplines
• Student projects

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