Examination of Cognitive Structure of Secondary School Students Registered to BILSEM Regarding the Concept of "Virus"

Abstract

With the Covid 19 pandemic, the phenomenon of "virus" has effectively entered human life around the world, and with this phenomenon, the daily terminology has also changed. Naturally, this phenomenon has been associated with some words in the human mind and cognitive structures have emerged. 26 students participated in this study, which was conducted to examine the cognitive structures of the middle school students enrolled in BILSEM regarding the concept of "virus". The study was carried out with the screening model, one of the qualitative research methods; The word association test, which is one of the projection techniques, was used. The participant students were given the keyword "virus", a form with "virus" was given five times in a row, and they were asked to write the first five concepts that came to mind about the "virus". In this way, it was tried to determine with which words the students cognitively associated the concept of "virus" in their minds. The obtained data were evaluated by content analysis. First, frequency and percentage tables were created with the data controlled separately by the researchers, and then themes were created. These themes were named as “Diseases”, “Treatment”, “Measure”, “Source of Disease”, “Science” and “Emotion” dimensions by the researchers. It was concluded that the words related to the themes of "Measure", "Diseases", and "Treatment" were used the most.