The effect of flipped classroom model on 7th grade students' academic achievement and attitudes in English teaching

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in parallel with the development of technology in every field, there has been rapid progress in the field of education, too. Education has changed to a very different dimension with the active use of the internet, computers, tablets, phones and smart boards in the education process. With the use of information technologies in education, where traditional education models were used until recent years, an understanding has been adopted that education is not only done within classroom, but also can be done anywhere and at any time. For this reason, new education models have emerged in parallel with the constantly developing and changing technological developments in education. One of these education models is the flipped classroom, whose popularity is increasing day by day. This model can be expressed as the theoretical information given in the course and the processes of increasing the level of knowledge on the subject are done at home, and the activities done at home to reinforce the subject are done at school. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the flipped classroom on the academic achievement of 7th grade students in English calass and their attitudes towards the course. The study group of the research consists of 80 students (experimental group = 39; control group = 41) studying at a secondary secondary school in Onikişubat district of Kahramanmaraş province in the 2022-2023 academic year. The study, which used a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group, lasted a total of 11 weeks. Lessons were conducted with the flipped classroom in the experimental group and with the traditional method in the control group. Before and after the experimental study, academic achievement test and attitude scale towards English course were applied to both groups as pretest and posttest. The achievement test of the research was developed by the researcher and consisted of 31 questions. The item difficulty of the achievement test was calculated as .57, the item discrimination was calculated as .43, and the Kuder Richardson-20 (KR-20) value, which was used to determine its internal consistency, was calculated as .84. SPSS 26 package program was used to analyze the data obtained at the end of the application. Paired groups and independent groups t-test was used to analyze the data. The experimental and the control group students were compared in the academic achievement variable and as a result of this comparison, a statistically significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group. This revealed that conducting lessons with the flipped classroom in English lessons is more effective than the traditional method. In the attitude variable towards English course, the average of the experimental group was higher than the average of the control group, but this difference was not statistically significant. The average of the experimental group students in the affective sub-dimension of the attitude scale is higher than the average of the control group; however, this difference is not statistically significant. In the cognitive sub-dimension, the average of the control group students is higher than the experimental group students but this difference is not statistically significant. According to the findings, it is recommended to be used in other teaching levels and at different grade levels as the flipped classroom model has a positive effect on learning. Keywords: Teaching English, Blended Learning, Flipped Classroom, Traditional Teaching, Academic Achievement, Attitude.