Opinions of Geography and Social Sciences Student-Teachers on the Concepts of Urbanization and Urbanizing

Abstract

Objective of the study is to determine the opinions of university students on urbanization and urbanizing (urbanizing can also be defined as “becoming urbanized,” “urban culture,” or “urban adaptation” and will be used with these meanings throughout the study) and their misconceptions on this subject. Data of the research were obtained from the free word association test applied to 74 fourth- and fifth-grade students from the geography teaching department who took the course of urban geography and 67 students from the social sciences teaching department who took the four lessons in which the subjects of urbanization and urbanizing were told by the researcher. Data obtained from the study were classified and categorized according to their semantic relationships by researcher. When categories examined, it is seen that students cannot distinguish the concepts of urbanization and urbanizing thoroughly and they include almost the same statements. This result shows that there are a lot of misconceptions. Although some student-teachers took the course of urban geography and others were presented about the subject briefly, it is difficult to capture a conceptual integrity in perception. Students mostly confuse the concepts of urbanization and urbanizing. In fact they are not even at the cognitive level needed for distinguishing the concepts of urban, urbanize and urbanization. Statements that they wrote about the concepts of urbanization and urbanizing resemble and these statements define the urban more.