The Role of out-of-school learning activities on students' reflective thinking skills and attitudes towards life science course

In this study, it was aimed to develop reflective thinking skills of 3rd grade primary school students through out-of-school learning environments and to determine their attitudes towards life science course. The research was designed with the nested mixed model from mixed method research. While the quantitative dimension of the research was designed with a weak experimental design, case study was used in the qualitative dimension. The research was carried out in two stages: the development of data collection tools and the implementation of the experimental intervention phase. While determining the study group of this research, maximum variation sampling was used as a sampling method. This research was conducted with a total of 28 3rd grade students (15 boys and 13 girls) from a public school in Küçükçekmece district of Istanbul province. The quantitative data of the study were collected using the reflective thinking skills scale (YADÜÇ) developed by the researcher and the attitude towards life science course scale (HBTÖ) developed by Zayimoğlu-Öztürk and Coşkun (2015). Quantitative data were collected through focus group interviews, student reflective diaries, researcher's diary and KWL-A study form. In the analysis of the quantitative data, the experimental and control groups were compared with the "Mann Whitney U test" through the SPSS package program. The pre-test and post-test differences between the experimental and control groups were analyzed with the "Wilcoxon Test". Maxquda 24.6 program was used to analyze qualitative data. As a result of this study, the framework of how elementary school students' reflective thinking skills develop with the dimensions of "habit, comprehension, cognitive reflection, non-cognitive reflection and critical reflection" consisting of five steps was determined. It was observed that students' reflective thinking skills and attitudes towards life science course developed through out-of-school learning environments.