The effect of the case study supported 5E teaching model on the critical thinking skills of students in teaching society scientific topics

In the 21st century, it has become a necessity to raise individuals equipped with the necessary skills to develop and meet the demands of our developing world. The importance of students being able to think critically, question, conduct research and collaborate on innovative solutions is increasing day by day. It is known that these so-called 21st century skills, are included in the curriculum implemented in our country. Within this context, the Science course offers important opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking skills. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of the 5E teaching model supported by case studies on students' critical thinking skills in the teaching of socio-scientific issues. The topics chosen as socioscientific issues were from the "Systems and Health in Our Body" unit in the 6th grade Science course. This study was designed with explanatory sequenatial design. Mixed method was used. A total of 24 6th graders were included in the study, 12 in the experimental group and 12 in the control group. The research was implemented for 5 weeks. Contents appropriate to socio-scientific issues were selected for the experimental and control groups. Lesson plans prepared in accordance with the processing of socio-scientific issues with the 5E teaching model for were applied in the experimental group. For the control group lesson plans were prepared within the scope of the science curriculum. In the quantitative part of the research, "UF/EMI Critical Thinking Disposition Scale" was used to measure the critical thinking disposition of the students. The scale was applied twice, before and after the application, to the experimental and control groups. In the qualitative part of the research; KWL (Know, Want to know, Learned Bil, Want, Learn) schemes were used for data collection. Quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS 27 statistics program. As a result of the analyses, it was seen that there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the critical thinking disposition scale of the experimental group. It was seen that there was no significant difference between the post-test scores of the experimental group and the post-test scores of the control group. The content analysis of the qualitative data collected with KWL schemes showed that there was an increase in the critical thinking skills of the experimental group compared to the control group.