Turkish Vocational School Students’ Perception of 5E Teaching Model

Abstract

This purpose of this study is to determine perception of students about implementation of 5E teaching model, one of the applications of constructivist approach in classroom environment, in vocational schools. For this purpose a 32-question survey was administered. 631 students were surveyed, including 227 male, 404 female studentsof 13 different programmes in Tunceli Vocational School of Tunceli University during the 2011-2012 academic year. Average, t-test, standard deviation, frequency and percentage distribution were used for the analysis of the research data. According to the results of the study, significant variations by gender were detected in 6 items, including “Supporting learning by revealing pre-knowledge”, “Defining the wrong points in the developed hypotheses ”, “Considering as unnecessary the instructor’s encouragement tolearn”, “Listening to the explanations of my friends”, “Giving opportunity for peer-review among students” and “Giving answers to questions with admissible evidences”. Affirming with their replies, the students revealed the applicability of the model. However further studies are necessary to see the implementation of the phases of the 5E model respectively, and it is considered that different researches should be performed with the purpose ofobserving that necessarypre-learning for each phase has been carried out.