Participatory Educational Research

The purpose of the research was to determine the opinions of middle school students about the inclusion of controversial issues in social studies course. In this mixed methods study, an explanatory design was used, and the participants involved middle school students studying in Kırşehir, Osmaniye, and Diyarbakır provinces of Turkey during the 2020-2021 academic year. The quantitative data were collected using the “Student Questionnaire for Controversial Issues” while the qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS 25 and the qualitative data were analyzed through MAXQDA 20. In the analysis of quantitative data, descriptive statistics (percentage, frequency, mean, standard deviation) and t-test and one-way analysis of variance/ANOVA were used since the data had normal distribution. Tukey test was administered to determine between which groups the difference existed. In the qualitative phase, audio-recorded interviews were converted into Word files, then analyzed and divided into meaningful codes. Four themes emerged by combining the codes in common categories. As a result of the research, it was found that the controversial topics that the students wanted to be included in the social studies course the most were human rights and violence. Whilst the subject of terrorism was determined as the subject that the students did not want to be included in the lesson in the quantitative dimension, it was determined that there were different opinions among the students regarding including the subject of terrorism in the qualitative dimension. It was also found that participants’ opinions about the inclusion of controversial issues differed in terms of gender, grade level, the city they live in, and reading habits. The reason why all of the students wanted controversial topics to be included in the course was to learn about controversial issues and to raise their awareness of these issues