Investigating Pre-service Primary School Teachers' Awareness Regarding Nuclear Energy as a Socio-scientific Issue

Pre-service teachers' awareness of nuclear energy as a socio-scientific issue is critical to understanding how future educators perceive and communicate complex scientific issues. Investigating the awareness of pre-service primary school teachers, who are expected to be more conscious about nuclear energy, to be able to think and discuss about the possible consequences and to provide accurate information to their future students, will help to reveal their current thoughts and knowledge. The aim of the study is to investigate the awareness of pre-service primary school teachers about nuclear energy and nuclear power plants. In this study, a survey method was adopted. Easily accessible sampling method was used to determine the study group. The study group consisted of 112 pre-service primary school teachers studying at the faculty of education of a university in the Eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey. The data of the study were collected through an unstructured interview form, analyzed by content analysis and presented as frequencies and percentages. It was observed that 55.4% of the pre-service primary school teachers' explanations about the concept of nuclear energy were in the category of partially scientific explanation and 59.8% of the pre-service primary school teachers did not favor the establishment of a nuclear power plant. In all grade levels, it was determined that female pre-service teachers who did not want the establishment of nuclear power plants were more than male pre-service teachers. It was determined that female pre-service teachers mentioned the harm dimension of nuclear energy more than male pre-service teachers on the basis of both gender and class. It was observed that 4th grade pre-service teachers made more positive explanations about the establishment of nuclear power plants compared to other grades. The pre-service teachers mostly focused on the environmental damage caused by nuclear energy and stated that the most fundamental issue is radiation. It was observed that they made statements that in case of an explosion in a nuclear power plant due to an earthquake or another reason, radiation would be released and that it was not easy to dispose of radioactive waste. In this case, it is important to provide the necessary information about the durability of nuclear power plants and how nuclear waste will be stored.