Abstract
This study aims to investigate how pre-service elementary school teachers understand 'something scientific', 'being scientific', 'scientific events' and 'scientific questions' through semantic network analysis. To achieve this purpose, this study carried out a central analysis of the frequency and density of words and the degree of connection between key words, a concentric analysis, a click analysis and a common network analysis through text semantic network analysis by using NetMiner 4.0 Program. Based on the results of these analyses, this study came to the following conclusions. Firstly, in perceiving 'something scientific', pre-service elementary school teachers recognized 'verification', 'objective' and 'experiment' as most important words. In other words, they perceived that main grounds for something scientific should be provided through clear facts, possible to be verified and accompanied by an exact and logical theoretical system. In regard to 'being scientific', they perceived 'explanation', 'objective' and 'verification' as most important words, while having a traditional point of view that science is a set that can be explained objectively. Secondly, in regard that the term, 'observation', is contained in 'scientific events', they showed a high rate of understanding it as a scientific event. In regard to scientifical reasons, they showed the highest frequency of 'observation', and for unscientific reasons, they showed the highest frequency of 'behavior'. In perceiving 'scientific questions', they showed the highest frequency of determining bacteria-related questions as scientific. As a reason why they thought as scientific, they mentioned 'observation' most frequently like 'scientific events', while mentioning 'value judgement' as a reason why they thought as unscientific most frequently. From the results of integrated network analysis, this study found out that words pre-service teachers commonly used in stating scientific events or scientific questions were overlapped with words they mentioned for scientific events or scientific questions. As a result, it was found there were many pre-service teachers having interpreted scientific words without clearly distinguishing scientific events or scientific questions.
