The effect of drama method on students achievement and conscious consumerism in social studies

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of drama method on students? achievement, conscious consumerism and retention in Social Science Instructional Programs of primary school fourth grade ?Production, Distribution and Consume? learning area, ?From Production to Consume? unit. The study group consisted of 40 fourth grade students including 20 test group and 20 control group student at Necdet Islar Primary School located in Sakarya, Adapazarı in 2010-2011 educational term. The research was designed in accordance with an experimental research model composed of pre-test and post-test with control and experimental groups.In experimental group, lessons were conducted with drama lesson plan and in control group conventional method was used. As data collection tool ?Scale for the Level of Conscious Consumerism? and ?From Production to Consume Achievement Test? were used. Pre-application of the achieve test was applied in three public schools in Istanbul. According to the result of pre-application, alpha reliability coefficient of the achievement test was found as .95. ?Scale for the Level of Conscious Consumerism?with a Cronbach Alpha reliability coefficient of .77 accounts for 49.5 of thevariance.The result of the research showed that there is a significant different between the total points of the post-test and retention-test of the test group and control group in favor of test group in which drama method was used. The result of ?Scale for the Level of Conscious Consumerism? showed that mean of the test group is higher than control group but it made no difference statistically.Key Words: Primary Education, Social Studies, Drama Method, Conscious Consumerism