The effect of nature based outdoor activities upon the science knowledge levels, scientific process skills and attitudes towards environment of the fifth grade students

The purpose of this research is to determine the effectiveness and persistency of nature based outdoor activities upon the science knowledge levels, scientific process skills and attitudes of the fifth grade students towards environment in the period of teaching ?Human and Environment? subject in scope of Primary School Fifth Grade Science and Technology Lesson; `Visit and Learn the Bio-World?. The studied group was consisted of two sections in fifth grade level studying at a public primary school in Ankara in 2010?2011 school year. The data of the research was gathered with three different data collection tools developed by the researcher for the purpose of measuring the science knowledge levels, scientific process skills and attitudes of the students towards environment. The analysis of the data in this research which was carried out in compliance with pretest-posttest-observation test with control group semi experimental pattern, was made with the help of SPSS package program and repeated measures analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) was used regarding science knowledge and scientific process skills while repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used regarding attitudes towards environment. As the result of the research, it was observed that the interaction between the class and application was meaningful in terms of knowledge, skill and attitude variations, and that no statistical difference was found between control and experiment groups in terms of class variation. Keywords: Nature Based Outdoor Activities, Science Knowledge, Scientific Process Skills, Attitude Towards Environment