The Analysis of New Turkish Science and Technology Curriculum in Terms of STS Objectives

National Curricula in Turkey for Science and Technology from 4th to 8th grade have been under revision since 2003. The major goal of the new science and technology curriculum is the development of scientific literacy. One of indispensible dimension of scientific literacy is the understanding of Science, Technology, and Society relationships. This aspect was integrated into the curriculum in three domains: The nature of science and technology, the relationship between science and technology, and the social and environmental connections of science and technology. The aim of this paper is to analyze the weight of each STSE objective in the curriculum. The results indicated that STSE objectives were not distributed homogeneously in the curriculum. Moreover, no objective about the nature of science and technology domain was found among the objectives which are mostly referred. Instead, the mostly cited STSE objectives are generally related with two domains, which are the relationship between science and technology and the social and environmental connections of science and technology. Thus, it can be implied that to achieve the ultimate goal of scientific literacy, all three domains proposed in the foreword of curriculum to be given equal emphasis.