The effect ot the instruction based on case studies on academic success and retention levels in life studies course in primary school

During these days in which we have been experiencing information age, in order toreach ever-increasing knowledge and adopt ourselves changed social life caused bythese knowledge, individuals, institutions and the society in general expose veryimportant necessity. This is the necessity of improving ourselves. The purpose ofeducation should be to develop skills in children to reach knowledge rather thantransmitting this konwledge to them. Life studies has a crucial role in training thestudents with these skills.Life studies is in the first rank among the fundamental courses trying to developrequired knowledge and skills related to the social life. Life studies is being perceivedas a course based on knowledge. Howewer, life studies is the life in itself. Life studies isthe first course in which the social life and its norms are taught. In this context, in thiscourse the students are being trained in order to follow current events and facts.Therefore, it is not possible to teach life studies which draws its content primarily fromthe life by traditional teaching methods. It is needed the teaching methods which helpthe students to solve the potential problems, to comprehend and apply the ways towardsgaining required knowledge and to reconstruct the knowledge obtained by his/her ownexperiences. One of these methods is case studies.The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of the instruction based on casestudies on academic success and retention levels of primary school students in lifestudies courses. In this research, pre and post-test controlled group model was used. Itwas applied during the first term of 2003-2004 academic year at Şehit Ali Gaffar OkkanPrimary School in Eskişehir. 3-B and 3-C grades participated in this study. 3-C gradewas selected as the control group and 3-B grade was selected as experimental grouprandomly.In order to have homogeneity of the groups and measure the academic success andrecalling levels of the groups, the achievement tests on ?Where We Live? and ?OurSocial Life? units have been developed. For teaching life studies course with casestudies teaching plans, case studies texts with pictures were prepared as well.For data analyses, averages of pre-test, post-test and recall test scores were calculatedand standard deviation of the scores were found out, and t-test was used for groupcomparison. The groups? average difference was interpreted as .05 levelThe findings of this study can be summarized as follows:• There was a significant difference in favour of the experimental group between theacademic successes of the experimental group and the control group.• There was a significant difference in favour of the experimental group between theretention levels of the experimental group and the control group. These findingssuggest that both of the hypotheses of this study were confirmed.