An Investigation of Students’ Perceptions of their Sociology Course in terms of the Course’s Importance, their Social Attainment and the Learning Environment

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ perception of their high school sociology course. State schools instructing sociology lessons as a selective course in Maltepe district were selected as the research population with 795 high school students. By using cluster sampling method, 296 students were involved in the research sample. The data were collected through “Sociology Course Perception Scale” developed by the researchers of this study. The performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses showed that 3-factor structure accounts for 68% of total variance and the measurement model has an acceptable goodness of fit (X2 /sd=2,803; GFI=0.896; CFI= 0.901; RMSEA= 0.078). One-Way ANOVA, ANCOVA and regression analyses were performed on the collected data. According to the research findings,  students stated sociology course’s perceived importance and social attainments as “average level” and sociology course’s perceived learning environment as “low level”. It was found that students who have better marks in sociology course and GPA perceived sociology course higher level whereas others have lower perception of the course. At the end of multi-regression analysis, it was determined that students’ perception of the course’s importance and learning environment account for % 45 of social attainment perception. It was seen that while controlling for students’ perception regarding course learning environment, students’ perceived important scores did not differentiate for their grade point average and sociology course score.