The Impact of STEM-based laboratory activities on pre-service science teachers’ competence perceptions in 21st-Century Skills and STEM Awareness

This study aims to investigate the impact of laboratory activities prepared based on STEM-based learning on the competence perceptions in 21st-century skills (learning and innovation skills, life and career, information, media, and technology skills) and STEM awareness. The sample group consisted of 53 pre-service science teachers studying in year 2 of a public university. A quasi-experimental design formed the basis of this experimental study conducted as a quantitative research model. Pre-service teachers were randomly assigned, one to the experimental group (n=28) and the other to the control group (n=25). The experimental group was presented with laboratory activities based on STEM-based learning. In contrast, the control group had only laboratory activities (i.e., a group of students who did not conduct STEM-based laboratory activities). The measurement tools were the 21st Century Skills Competence Perception Scale (21st Century SCS) and the STEM Awareness Scale (SAS). All participants in the study expressed their agreement generally on the level of “I agree” for all three dimensions of the 21st Century SCS regarding STEM. As a result of the implementation, the SCS sub-dimension of “information, media and technology skills” and SAS skills of the experimental group students were higher than those of the students in the control group. It was found that the experimental group used the media and technology effectively and to use technology to access, analyze and share information. It was also thought that the individuals' problem-solving, critical, and high-level thinking skills developed more than the control group, thanks to the higher STEM awareness in the experimental group. Finally, some implications were proposed based on the research results from the STEM-based learning laboratory activities

The Hegemonic Preservation Thesis Revisited: The Example of Turkey

This paper offers a critical rereading of the history of judicial review of constitutional amendments in Turkey. We argue that, contrary to appearances, the claim to a power of amendment review on the part of the Turkish Constitutional Court does not fit Ran Hirschl’s model of hegemonic preservation, which aims to explain the genesis of strong constitutionalism and judicial review as the result of an anti-democratic elite consensus that tries to leverage the prestige of judicial institutions. Attempts to impose Hirschl’s model on the constitutional history of the Turkish Republic have been very popular in the jurisprudential literature on Turkey, but the model offers a misleading and incomplete diagnosis of what ails Turkish constitutionalism. It is not the supposed excessive strength of formal constitutionalism and judicial review in Turkey, but rather the normative weakness of the Turkish Constitution of 1982, that is responsible, at least in part, for Turkey’s repeated constitutional crises. We therefore suggest an alternative template for understanding Turkish constitutional history—the theory of sovereignty as the power to decide on the exception put forward by Carl Schmitt. © 2016, T.M.C. Asser Press

Siyaset teorisi ile siyasi pratik arasındaki ilişki üzerine bir inceleme: liberal-normatif siyaset teorisine yöneltilen realist eleştirinin değerlendirmesi

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Thesis (Ph.D.): Bilkent University, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2017.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-173).This thesis is a study of value of theorizing for the practical world of politics. It addresses the question of how it is advisable to conceive the relationship between political theory and political practice. It does so by focusing on contemporary discussions about realism and moralism in political theory. Realism is a contemporary theoretical approach that poses a challenge to the dominant liberal paradigm, which allegedly bases its understanding of politics on the primacy of the moral over the political. The meaning and implications of such moralized understanding are explored, in this dissertation, in relation to John Rawls. After presenting a reading of Rawls’s major works in relation to the relationship between political theory and political practice, I specify general principles guiding the recent realist revival in political theory. This account suggests that realism encompasses a wide variety of non-moralizing positions whose critical purchase on dominant political theory varies. More critically, it illustrates how some varieties of realism invite moralism through the back door, primarily due to their insistence on some form of foundationalism for a political theory to be action-guiding. I single out John Dunn’s sceptical activist realism and Raymond Geuss’s critical activist realism as two alternative candidates that exhibit the possibility of political theory, centred on the notion of political judgment, to be action-guiding without having foundational commitments of the kind typically presupposed. This account essentially presents an alternative conceptualization of the relationship between political theory and political practice to that of mainstream liberal political theory.by Gülşen Seven.Ph. D