The effect of virtual museum use on students' sensitivity to cultural heritage and attitudes in 4th grade social studies lesson

This study aims to examine the effect of virtual museum use in social studies lessons on 4th grade students' sensitivity to cultural heritage and their attitudes toward the course. The sample of the study consisted of a total of 63 students (34 in the experimental group and 29 in the control group) studying in the 4th grade of a primary school in the Esenler district of Istanbul during the 2024–2025 academic year. Virtual Museum Activities were implemented in the experimental group for a duration of 8 weeks, while the lessons in the control group were conducted in accordance with the curriculum. This thesis adopts a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design, one of the quantitative research models. As data collection tools, the Cultural Heritage Sensitivity Scale developed by Halaç, Gürdoğan-Bayır, and Çengelci-Köse (2021) and the Primary School Social Studies Course Attitude Scale developed by Ocakcı (2022) were used. These measurement tools were administered to the groups as pretest, posttest, and retention test. The data were analyzed using the SPSS 23.0 statistical software. In line with the assumption that the students' scores did not show a normal distribution, and in order to obtain more reliable results, the Mann-Whitney U test was used for unrelated groups, and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used for related groups. As a result of the data analysis, a significant difference in favor of the posttest was observed in the experimental group's cultural heritage sensitivity and attitude scores between the pretest and posttest. However, no statistically significant difference was found between the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental and control groups regarding their sensitivity to cultural heritage and attitudes. These findings are evaluated in the discussion section of the study.