Examination of Cognitive Structures and Conceptual Development Process of Students in “Adventure of Democracy” Unit of Social Studies Lesson

One of the measurement assessment tools used to determine whether the relationships between the concepts in the students long-term memory is adequate or not, is a word association test.Survey method was used in the research. The study group of the study consisted of 33 students who are enrolled in the 6th grade of a secondary school located in Kangal district of Sivas province. This study was carried out through the word association test to reveal the cognitive structure of the studetns about 10 concepts in the curriculum and to examine the conceptual change process and to determine the misconceptions of the students in “Adventure of Democracy” the unit. As a result; It was found that students mostly used words like ”management, state, choice in their concept networks. In addition, students have some misconceptions about concepts such as asi monarchy, constitutionalism, oligarchy, republic, executive, theocracy, etc. ” in both concept and related sentences.