The effect of using multiple representations on academic succes and attitude of students in social studies

The quality of the learning environment affects the condition of the learning. Thus, in order to enrich the learning environment, the teachers should make use of the effective teaching and learning approaches in their lessons. Especially in social sciences lessons that lots of disciplines, concepts and knowledge are taught by an interdisciplinary approach. Those approaches should be used skilfully. One of those approaches is the multiple- representations approach is an effective approach in teaching abstract concepts and develops the students' mental abilities. The aim of this research is to test the effectiveness of the education that is supported with multiple- representation approach in social- sciences lesson that contain lots of abstract concepts. In this context in this research quasi- experimental pretesting and contral group proof positive approach – one of the quantitative researches- are used. Sample of this of this research is a group of 40 students who are studying at the 4 th grade of primary schools. ''The Envirenment we live Questionaire'' that is developed by the researcher and ''The tendency attitude scale for social sciences lesson''that is taken from Arslan and Şahiner have been used as data colletion tool. As a result of this research it is found that the use of multiple- representation approach affects the academical success of the students and their tendency towards social sciences lesson positively.