Full Length Research Paper

Student teachers’ knowledge of and attitudes toward chemical hormone usage in biotechnology

Mustafa Özden¹, Muhammet Uşak², Pavol Prokop³, Aziz Türkoğlu⁴* and Mehmet Bahar⁵

¹Department of Science Education, Faculty of Education, Adıyaman University, Adıyaman, Turkey.

²Department of Elementary Education, Faculty of Education, Dumlupınar Universitesi, Kutahya, Turkey.

³Department of Biology, Faculty of Education, Trnava University, Priemyselná, Trnava, Slovakia.

⁴Department of Biology, Faculty of Arts and Science, Nevsehir University, Nevsehir, Turkey.

⁵Department of Science Education, Faculty of Education, Abant Izzet Baysal University, Bolu, Turkey.

*Correspondence author. E-mail:  turkoglu.aziz@gmail.com.

Accepted 2 July, 2008

Application of modern technologies may be problematic especially if they possess health risks to humans and/or when humans are not aware about these technologies. In this study we investigated non-major student teachers’ attitudes to and knowledge of the chemical hormone usage, a controversial topic in the field of modern biotechnology. Although students’ knowledge was considered to be limited (8 of 14 items were correctly responded by more than half of participants), we failed to find any differences in mean scores with respect to age or gender. In contrast, females showed less favourable attitudes toward chemical hormones than males. These gender differences were found in topics that represented relatively higher risk to human health which supports the “gender paradox hypothesis” which proposes that females have more tentative attitudes towards new products than males because they buy food for children.  

Key words: Attitudes, chemical hormone usage, biotechnology.