A study on biology student teachers’ conceptions of learning

Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate biology student teachers’ conceptions of learning. This study focuses on the following question: How do biology student teachers conceptualize the term “learning”? A total of 86 biology students, who were studying to become secondary biology teachers at the education faculty of a university in Turkey, participated in this study. To reveal participating students’ conceptions of learning they were asked to answer the open-ended question: “What is learning?”. Data obtained from the question was analyzed and the frequencies of the responses were classified in six categories. The results of this study have shown that the variation of participating students’ conceptions of learning includes all of six conceptions of learning identified originally by Marton et al. (1993) . Participants focused mainly on the conceptions of learning as the increase of knowledge and learning as the acquisition of facts or procedures. These results are compared with related literature and recommendations are provided.