Pixel International Conferences

It is obvious that science and nature is very connected subjects. With the reason of this connection, nature can be a good teaching tool for students to be science thinker and science thinker students will evaluate the nature in a scientific manner. In addition, naturel education processes should be arranged according to “research and discovery” teaching strategy and learning processes should enable students’ active participation.  Therefore, the general purpose of this study was to examine the effect of active learning based nature camp activities on university students’ scientific knowledge and conceptual understandings about nature.  In order to achieve this purpose, the natural, historical, archeological and the cultural sources of the Cappadocia area were used as teaching tools in the nature activities based on active learning. One group experimental design was used in the study. 19 university students at different grades from different cities of Turkey participated in the study. The study was carried out with the support of TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) at Niğde University, within the scope of the project named ‘Ecology Founded Nature Camp in the Cappadocia Region’.  Scientific knowledge survey, Scientific Process Skills Scale, Conceptual Understanding interviews were used as a data collection tools in the study. Frequency and Man Whitney-U analysis techniques were used during assessment of the data collected in the study. As a result of the study, there wasn’t any significant difference found between the pretest and post test results of university students’ scientific knowledge and scientific process skills test. Besides this, students presented more scientific concepts about the nature and natural problems in the post interview results than the first interview results in the study.