The Primary School Teaching Students’ Competences of Performing Biology Experiments and Analyzing Scientific Process Skills

This study aims at determining the primary school teaching students’ competences of performing biology experiments carried out in the curriculum of the class of science and technology laboratorial applications ii, and of analyzing the scientific process skills in aforementioned experiments. the sampling of the study was constituted by 45 candidate teachers studying their second year at uludağ university, education faculty, primary school teaching department, in the class of science and technology laboratorial applications ii, in the spring term of the academic year 2008-2009. the data of the study was collected by the help of the laboratorial competences observation charts and scientific process skills analysis reports. the study has a descriptive nature and uses semi structured observations of quantitative research as the data collecting method. as a result of the study, it was concluded that while the candidate teachers had no difficulty during performing the biology experiments where motor skills were used, they faced problems in the experiments where the microscopes were used. they did not perform the model creation experiments in some fields such as mitosis and meiosis where they had lack of pre-knowledge. in addition, it was observed that the candidate teachers could not determine some processes which the experiments include such as classification, making deductions, experimenting, changing the variables and controlling.