The Perception of Technology in Secondary School Students’ Drawings and Expressions

Abstract

With today’s developing technology, students’ ways of living, learning, and working have been changing rapidly, leading them to acquire new approaches related to technology. The main objective of this study is to identify the views of secondary school students regarding technology. The participants of the study, which was designed as a qualitative study, consisted of 5th grade students studying at a state secondary school in the district of Yalova, Turkey in the fall semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. The data of the study, which consisted of students’ pictures and written expressions, were analyzed with the content analysis technique. As far as the emerging results are concerned, while the students emphasized the more useful and entertaining aspects of technology as its positive features, they expressed their opinions on the lack of social communication, energy insufficiency and environmental damage as technology’s negative features. In the students’ perceptions, it can be seen that technology makes their lives easier, but that the harms to personal health, social communication and the environment are taken into account. Since the study was carried out with 5th grade students, perception of technology at different age and grade levels is a matter of interest for future research. In this sense, it is possible to recommend identifying the direction of the trends with studies to be conducted with different age levels.