The impact of scratch program and web assisted cooperative learning method on the level of conceptual understanding and critical thinking skills of 5th grade students

UNDERSTANDING AND CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS OF 5TH GRADE STUDENTS By providing necessary technological infrastructure to schools, the aim is to develop IT Supported Teaching and making teachers and students use technology effectively. Furthermore, in the 2018 teaching programme of "Science Lesson,", in the "Engineering and Design Skills" sub-section, the students are expected to approach problems with a multidisciplinary point of view and to generate an end product. Coding skill is defined as a language to communicate using information Technologies. Also, currently it is usual to see digital game design in coding educations. In the research in this field, use of Scratch Software is recommended for the new beginners of coding education, to create games and stories. The purpose of this research is to observe the effect of web-supported "cooperative teaching" method using Scratch software, on 5th grade students' level of conceptual understanding and critical thinking skills. The research has been performed at Bursa, in a public school in spring 2018, with 4 classes of 5th grades, where 2 of them is control and the other 2 is experimental group, with 96 students in total. To the experimental groups, different than the control groups, a coding training of 16 hours was given, using the Scratch software. The experimental group which attended the coding training was asked to design games related to the subject of "biodiversity" , which they had learned at the Science Lesson, working with the method of cooperative teaching. Two gradual evaluation questions derived from the unit of " Human and Environment",which had been created to detect the students' level of conceptual understanding in the programme of Science Teaching, are used as a tool to collect information. In the research, in order to provide the scope's validity we considered the comments of an expert and used a determinant table. To provide the "face validity"', interviews were done with seven 8th grade last year students. We used the "Critical Thinking Survey" as a tool to retrieve information to determine students' critical thinking skills. In the study, experimental design with pre-test-posttest control group was applied and the data were analyzed by using t-test for related samples. The results show that the experimental group has a better score compared to the control group in the means of conceptual understanding level. Additionally, when we look at the scores of the control group, we see that students in the experimental group which used the "I.T. Supported Cooperative Learning with Scratch" method, have further improved their skills of critical thinking. As a result of this study, it is observed that encouraging students to prepare a project on an academic subject while learning coding with Scratch, has a positive effect on their conceptual understanding and critical thinking skills. As a result of this study, Science Teachers are recommended to use "I.T. Supported Cooperative Learning with Scratch" actively in teaching. It is considered as beneficial for program developers to consider making a curriculum that can help people develop high-level thinking skills such as critical thinking, while allowing them to discover that they are different from other individuals. Keywords: Scratch, coding, conceptual learning, critical thinking, web based collaborative learning