The effect of teaching activities designed for field dependet and independent students on their academic achievement and attitudes in the 5 th grade of the social studies course in elementary school

ABSTRACT Although teachers believe that they have been doing their best to accelerate the learning achievement in their classrooms, they have always been complaining about the fact that they cannot have a kind of successful learning on the desired level. In fact, teachers might not have an acceptable level of learning success even though they do a great deal of preparation before class and bring classroom various materials. One of the reasons of this is that just as students in a classroom have different physical characteristics they all have different cognitive styles and learning peculiarities. That teachers are aware of the fact that students have varying cognitive styles while considering their teaching approaches. Learner characteristics, which are called cognitive styles, emerge and form in the first grade of the elementary school. The teaching of social studies course is responsible for instructing learners the socialising and social ideals in this level and to carry out such a study which takes into consideration of the cognitive style dimensions would be beneficial to teachers who have been engaging in teaching this course. This study aimed at revealing the learner attitudes toward this course and efficiency of the course to academic success with the application of the course that is carried out appropriate to field dependent and field independent cognitive style dimensions in the 5th grade of the social studies course in elementary school. The design of the study was based on experimental and control group pre / post test model. The application related to the study was realized in the fall term of 2002 - 2003 academic year with the collaboration of Eskişehir Kazım Karabekir Elementary School and in the classrooms of 5-B and 5-A experimental and control group respectively. Throughout the study, teaching materials were developed by the researcher considering the cognitive styles of field dependent and field independent learners and were utilized in presenting the course. In order to collect data, an achievement test that would evaluate learners academic achievement and an attitude scale which was developed in collaboration with another researcher were used. IVThe data obtained were analysed by SPSS; with a significance level of.05 as the level of arithmetic mean, standart deviation, t test, percentage and differences between percentages were made use of to analyza the data. After statistical analysis, in this research, the following results were obtained: 1. There was a significant difference between the success of control group and experimental group, experimental group being more successful than the control group. 2. There wasn't a significant difference between the attitudes of control group students and those of experimental group.