The Effectiveness of the Interactive Book Reading on Primary School Students’ Images of Scientists

The current study examines the effects of interactive book reading (IBR) intervention on second-grade primary school students’ images of scientists. In line with this aim, the study primarily centered on the scientists’ appearance, workplace, and gender. The IBR intervention was conducted through the teacher’s read-aloud of a children’s book about scientists and how they work and subsequent discussions with the students about the book. The Draw-A-Scientist-Test (DAST) was employed to determine the students’ images of scientists before and after the intervention. Further, semi-structured interviews were performed with the students following each implementation of the DAST in order to enhance the comprehensibility of data (drawings) collected via DAST. As for the data analysis, the DAST-Checklist (DAST-C) was utilized to analyze the students’ drawings. While the participants’ drawings were encoded with DAST-C, the interview data of the same participants were used to clarify the unclear and uncertain items. The results revealed that the students had more stereotypical images of scientists before and moderately altered these images after the intervention. A transition from traditional to non-traditional was discovered regarding the students’ images of the scientists’ appearance and workplace. However, a minor difference was observed in the students’ images of the scientists’ gender, as a majority of the students portrayed the scientist as a man in the pre- and post-IBR intervention. By discussing the results of this research based on the relevant literature, some suggestions have been made for using children’s literature in teaching scientists’ characteristics to students.