5th grade social studies course overview in human and environmental unit: An action research

Concepts not only enable the individual to distinguish a group of entities, events, ideas and processes from other groups, but also help him establish relationships with other groups, entities, events, ideas and processes. Concepts are necessary for thinking. Understanding the concepts; Understanding principles is essential for problem solving and understanding the world. Misconceptions significantly hinder permanent and meaningful learning. In order to ensure meaningful and permanent learning, the misconceptions of the students should be determined before starting the teaching process and these misconceptions should be eliminated. The teaching of the concepts in this unit is important in terms of learning the subjects of the 5th grade Social Studies lesson, named "Human and Environment", in which geographical concepts such as maps, climate, environment and population are dominant, as well as the subjects belonging to the learning field "People, Places and Environments". offers. The abstractness of the subjects in this unit makes it difficult for students to learn the concepts in the subjects. Difficulties in learning concepts make it difficult to understand the subjects. In this research, the level of understanding of the concepts in the determined unit will be determined and the misconceptions they have will be determined. The aim of the research is to examine whether the misconceptions of 5th grade students in the "Human and Environment" unit have been resolved by doing an action research. The study group of the research consisted of 5/A and 5/B class students studying at Doruk Secondary School in Kaman district of Kırşehir province in the 2021-2022 academic year. It was carried out with 24 students according to the transportation and parental permission of the students in these classes. Action research, one of the qualitative research methods, was used as a method in the research. While determining the concepts, an open-ended question form, which includes the concepts aimed to be acquired by the students in the Human and Environment unit of the 5th grade social studies book (Ministry of National Education [MEB], 2020), was used, which was arranged in a way that the students could give the meanings of the concepts as short written answers. While evaluating the answers given by the students to the concepts in the form, the explanations made in the course book and the explanations in the Great Turkish Dictionary (Türk Dil Kurumu [TDK], 2021) were taken into consideration. The answers given by the students; The concept was classified as correct understanding, misconception and unanswered, and the concepts with the most misconceptions were determined according to the results by interpreting the percentage and frequency values. Activities designed by the researcher were carried out to eliminate the misconceptions, and the level of elimination of the misconceptions was checked.