The answers of the students to 3 open ended questions were analyzed by the researchers through content analysis.
The coding used for the analysis of the study was open coding which is one of the coding types suggested by
Strauss and Corbin (1990). With this purpose, first of all the data were collected according to the code list
formed by the conceptual structure and then rearrangements were made in the code list based on the new codes
that came out during the analysis process. The resulting codes were grouped based on their similarities and
differences and mental model categories were formed. The related literature was reviewed with the categories
and each category was named based on their explanations.