Investigate the effects of teaching earth, sun and moon topics through argumentation on the success, attitude and argumentation skills of 5th grade students

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of argumentation based science education on 5th grade students? academic success, attitude towards science and willingness to participate in the argument. 5th class? subject ?Earth, Sun and Moon? has been selected with this aim. Also, due to the applied method, the determination of the gender effect on the students? success, attitude towards science and willingness to participate in the argument is aimed.The experimental study in which pre-test and post-test control group design was used, was carried out with 5th grade students in Uşak, Ulubey Kuvayi Milliye Elementary School and Hüseyin Remzi Devecioğlu Elementary School in 2009-2010 academic year spring semester. The study was carried out 6 weeks 4 hours a week with 51 total students. 26 of them were the experiment group and 25 of them were the control group.Before practice, we applied pre-knowledge test for determine the level of groups. We based 5th class science and technology curriculum on preparing activities of argumentation.For the first two weeks, after measuring and evaluation the students? level of knowledge, the selected experiment group received scientific argumentation training and pre-test. For the other four weeks the teaching materials which were prepared according to argumentation focused science education and pre-tests were applied.The data obtained as a result of the study was evaluated by the t-test using SPSS software.There was significant change observed between the academic success rates and attitude towards of the students towards science who were subjected to traditional approach and the argumentation approach. There were also significant differences observed between the pre and post application argumentation skills of the students who were subjected to scientific argumentation approach.The success rates, attitudes and argumentation skills of the students showed no statistically significant variation according to gender.The findings in this study suggest that argumentation is effective on 5th grade students? understandings of concepts about ?Earth, Sun and Moon? topics.