The effect of brain based learning on academic success and retrieval of religious culture and moral knowledge in high school

Recently, rapidly changing technology, besides the speeding up of dissemination of information and changing living conditions gives educational institutions new functions. Educational institutions, whose duty is to bring up indivdiuals that respect values of the society they live in, are aware of the problems and produce solutions to these problems, and have self-confidence and responsibility, are affected by this change and development. One of the courses in educational institutions that aim to give individuals these abovementioned abilities is religious culture and moral knowledge. Religious culture and moral knowledge course is perceived as an area of intensive cognitive and affective learning due to the intensity of the verbal and abstract information it contains. However, it doesn't seem possible that religious culture and moral knowledge course can fulfill the teaching of the beforementioned information via the traditional approaches. It is possible with teaching approaches that are student-centered in teaching-learning process that the students can become individuals who can search, try, discuss, and observe. The brain-based learning is one of the teaching approaches that try to explain under which conditions effective and lasting learning takes place best. Brain-based learning is an approach in which students are constantly active and learn by seeing, hearing, and role-playing and in which a wide variety of teaching methods are used during the lessons. It's a form of learning that supports the need to adopt the rules of procedure of the brain and claims that teaching must be organized according to these rules in the mind for meaningful learning. There have been changes in the training programs in 2005 and such approaches as constructivist approach, multiple intelligences and student-centered learning were taken into consideration in the religious culture and moral knowledge course curriculum. The constructivist approach based on student-centered learning focuses on the student participation and teacher guidance in the learning process. In the newly-changed programs, it does not seem likely to achieve the desired objectives with traditional teaching methods. The changes envisaged in the religious education program can be realized and intended purposes can be attained with the use of brain-based learning approach in religious education classes. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of teaching the units of "Belief in Allah" and "Worship in Islam" in religious culture and moral course of 10th grade with lesson plans and activities prepared on the basis of brain-based learning approaches on academic achievement and permanence levels of students. The theoretical aspects of the subject are primarily discussed in this study; what the brain-based learning is, and issues like its principles, objectives, and studies in this field are highlighted. Afterwards the implementation of the units was carried out on the basis of brain-based learning approach. The subjects of the research were selected from the 10th grade students of Şehit Hasan Özüberk Anatolian High school in Kilis city center in 2014-2015 academic year autumn term. A total of 53 students assigned by random selection method from 10/B class as the experimental group and 10/F as control group were tested In the research, the design of Pre-test/Post-test control group was applied. Pre-test and final test were used as data collection tool and after about 21 days the retention test was performed. Results were analyzed with SPSS programme ANOVA and ANCOVA variance analysis was applied for the data analysis. According to the findings of the study, teaching based on the brain-based learning approach in favor of the experimental group was found to have meaningful effect on retention and academic achievement. Keywords: Brain-based learning, Religious Culture And Moral Knowledge, Religious Education