Design of educational digital comics material in science teaching and the effect of the use of the material on academic success

In this study, it was aimed to design an educational digital comic book on the subjects of "Food chain and energy flow" and "Energy transformations" in the Energy Conversions and Environmental Science unit in the 8th grade science course curriculum and to describe their stages, and to reveal the effects of the use of comic book material in teaching on the academic achievement of students. In the research conducted with the quantitative research method, an experimental design with pretest-posttest control group was used. The study of creating an academic achievement test was carried out with 150 9th grade students, and the study of teaching with educational comics was carried out with 62 8th grade students. First of all, an academic achievement test related to the subject was created and validity and reliability studies were carried out. Later, a literature review was conducted, information about comic book art was collected, a scientific story was written on the subject to be given to the students, and it was turned into a comic strip with a suitable Web 2.0 tool. After the experimental and control groups were determined, an introduction to the application was made in the first week. A prepared academic achievement test was applied to both groups as a pretest. The comic book application was carried out face to face for a total of 5 weeks and 20 lesson hours. At the end of the training, the academic achievement test was administered to the students once again as a posttest. Microsoft Excel and SPSS 22.0 statistical programs were used to analyze quantitative data in the research. Since the normality assumptions of the data obtained in the research will be effective in determining the analysis method applied, the normality test was first performed and thus it was seen that some of the data had a normal distribution and some did not. In order to conduct pre-test-post-test comparative analysis within the groups and with each other, comparative t test was used for groups that met the normality condition, and Mann Whitney-U analysis and Wilcoxon signed ranks analysis were performed for those that did not meet the normality condition. The significance level in these tests was accepted as p<0.05. According to the findings obtained as a result of the analysis, it was determined that there was a statistically significant difference between the posttest mean scores of the experimental group students, in which educational comics were used, and the control group students, in terms of academic achievement. It was concluded that the digital educational comics used in the science course had a positive effect on the academic achievement of the students.