Development and evaluation of inquiry-based teaching program enriched with augmented reality towards science topics

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of inquiry-based and augmented reality enriched inquiry-based curriculum developed for various science subjects based on the context of global climate change on the academic achievement, motivation, conceptual understanding and science process skills of typically developing and gifted 8th grade students and their opinions about the curriculum. The study was conducted with 53 typically developing 8th grade students enrolled in a middle school in Istanbul and 32 gifted 8th grade students enrolled in a Science and Art Center. The implementation of the developed curricula was carried out in the elective Environmental Education and Climate Change course at the middle school and in the science course at the Science and Art Center. Intervention design, one of the mixed research method designs, was used in the study. In order to evaluate the effect of the developed curricula on students' academic achievement and conceptual understanding, the "Two-Tier Diagnostic Test for Global Climate Change" developed within the scope of the study was used, in order to evaluate the effect on their science process skills, the "Science Process Skills Test" developed within the scope of the study was used, and in order to evaluate the effect on their motivation for instructional materials, the "Instructional Materials Motivation Scale" developed by Keller (2010) and adapted into Turkish by Dinçer and Doğanay (2016) was used. In addition, semi- structured interviews were conducted to examine students' views on the curricula developed. In the study, it was determined that both curricula contributed positively to students' academic achievement, motivation towards instructional material, conceptual understanding and science process skills, although the effect of the curriculum enriched with augmented reality was higher. Students perceived the developed curricula and augmented reality application as relevant to daily life, fun, rich in content, and facilitating learning.