According to Turkish primary education program, science and technology curriculum is divided into seven learning domains. Among these domains, “science-technology-environment-society”, “science process skills” and “values and attitudes” have certain learning outcomes that include basic understandings, skills, attitudes that need long-term experiences so they are all integrated in the topics of the whole curriculum (MONE, 2005). According to the organization of the curriculum, science process skills have more importance than other domains.
    Science activities alone are not enough to develop science process skills when students repeat activity procedures step-by-step without really understanding the scientific process. To make activities more effective, other aspects of science process skills, such as identifying problems, developing experimental designs, applying quantitative measures need to be developed by students (Shimizu, 1997). In addition, some other science process skills which are aimed to be taught in science and technology curriculum are: observing, classification, resulting, prediction, collecting data, measuring, data processing, interpretation, presenting (MONE, 2005).
    Science and technology courses are planned based on the main purposes of science and technology education and the science process skills. When planning science and technology courses, science activities and experiments are essential. It can be concluded that science process skills have an important role in science education and science experiments and activities are the key elements to develop science process skills. Textbooks, workbooks and activity books should have enough content to help students gain the science process skills which are aimed to be taught in the curriculum. In the light of the information above, this study aims to investigate the science process skills in popular science activity books which are used by primary school students in Turkey.

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