The effect of children's literature works on middle school students' compassion and altruisstic feelings and students' opinions on the implemented activities

The main purpose of this research is to determine the effect of children' licterature works on secondary school student's feelings of compassion and altruisstic and to determine the student's opinions about the practices. In line with this aim, a mixed-methods design, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques, was employed.In the quantitative section of the study, a "pretest-posttest control group randomized design," one of the true experimental designs, was used, while in the qualitative section, the interview method was adopted. The study group consisted of 6th-grade students studying at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Middle School in Muradiye district, Van province. A total of 40 students from the 6th grade of Fatih Sultan Mehmet Middle School during the 2023-2024 academic year were randomly assigned, with 20 students in the experimental group and 20 in the control group.In this study, the "Compassion Scale," developed by Nas and Sak (2020), and the "Altruistic Behavior Scale," developed by Erken (2009), were used as quantitative data collection tools, while an "Structured Interview Form" developed by the researchers was used as a qualitative data collection tool.For the analysis of quantitative data, the SPSS 18 software package was used to examine the normality values of the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental and control groups on the compassion and altruism scales. The Shapiro-Wilk test was used to check the normality assumptions for the selected analysis techniques. In this analysis process, a paired-samples t-test was conducted to compare the pretest and posttest scores within the same group, while an independent-samples t-test was used to compare the scores between groups.For the analysis of qualitative data, descriptive analysis was employed.The study results indicated that children's literature works had a positive effect on the development of middle school students' feelings of compassion and altruism. Additionally, the students expressed that the children's literature works contributed to the development of their compassion and altruistic behaviors.