This study investigates the students&rsquo / characteristics and school characteristics and their influences on scientific literacy skills of 15-year-old students across Turkey, Canada, and Sweden, through the use of data from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development&rsquo / s (OECD&rsquo / s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006. The purpose of this study is to gain a more complete understanding of the effect of human and physical resource allocations and their interaction on students&rsquo / scientific literacy skills using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques. By PISA 2006 results, in terms of scientific literacy, Canada is a high performing country whereas Turkey is far below the average and Sweden has a rank in the average. For modeling scientific literacy, student-level characteristics determined by student questionnaire, and school-level characteristics determined by school questionnaire were used. Results of the present study indicated that there were significant between-school differences in scientific literacy skills of students for all three countries. Turkey had the highest between-school variance and it was more than half of the total variance whereas in Canada and Sweden they were far lower. School type and size were common school factors affecting students&rsquo / scientific literacy skills in Canada and Sweden / however, in Turkey school admittance policies, educational resources, science promotional activities, and teacher qualities were school characteristics which have impact on scientific literacy. Enjoyment of learning science, self-efficacy in science, general value given to science, awareness of environmental issues, responsibility for sustainable development, and confidence in use of information technologies were common student factors affecting development of scientific literacy skills in the three countries. Finally, in all three countries cross-level interactions of student and school characteristics for developing scientific literacy skills were observed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612654/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Creators | Celebi, Ozgur |
| Contributors | Geban, Omer |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Ph.D. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for METU campus |
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