The effects of active learning model applied in 7th grade Turkish language course on students' critical thinking tendencies

The purpose of the study is to determine the effects of active learning model applied in the 7th grade Turkish Language course on students' critical thinking tendencies. The study group of the research consists of 59 students who were in the seventh grade during the academic year of 2016-2017 in Erzurum Province. Of these students, 29 students constituted the experimental group and 30 students constituted the control group. Experimental method was used in the study. In the quantitative part of the study, experimental design with pre-test post-test control group, which is one of the experimental research models, was used and case study was used in the qualitative part of the study. The experimental design of this study consists of one experimental group and one control group. While the units included in the study were planned and prepared in accordance with the active learning methods and techniques in the experimental group, they were planned and prepared in accordance with the activities of the Turkish Language course teaching program of the year 2015 and course book in the direction of national education acquisitions in the control group. Individual interviews were conducted with each of the 29 students in the experimental group with the help of the semi-structured interview form. The research process lasted for a total of 10 weeks, 2 hours per week. The experimental group was observed for 2 hours per week for a total of 20 hours for 10 weeks. In the control group, this observation process was applied for 2 hours per week for the last four weeks of the application period, for a total of 8 hours. Quantitative and qualitative data collection tools were used to obtain data for the sub-objectives identified in the research process. The California Mental Motivation Scale, developed to measure the students' critical thinking tendencies by Giancarlo, Blohm and Urdan (2004) and adapted to Turkish by Özdemir (2006) was applied as pre-test and post-test in the experimental and control groups. The semi-structured interview forms for the teacher and the students and observation form which were developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools to determine views on the impact of active learning methods and techniques on critical thinking tendencies and to reflect observations made by the researcher towards the application process. In the analysis of the quantitative data obtained from the study, α was set as 0.05 (α = 0.05). Using California Mental Motivation Scale to demonstrate the equivalence of the experimental and control groups in terms of their critical thinking tendencies; arithmetic mean of the scores they have taken from pre-test and post-test, standard deviation and mean values are included. The Shapiro-Wilk test was conducted to examine the data distribution of students' pre-test and post-test scores from the California Mental Motivation Scale. As a result of these tests, it was determined that the students in the experimental and control groups did not have a normal distribution of scores from pre-test and post-test. For this reason, the Mann-Whitney U test was performed for independent groups from nonparametric tests to determine whether there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores of the students in these study groups. Test and control group students were found to have no significant difference in terms of pretest sequence scores from the Mann Whitney U test. Regarding the same process, it was found that there was a significant difference between the experimental and control group students in terms of the final test scores they got from the Mann Whitney U Test. A Wilcoxon signed rank test was conducted for the matched groups to determine whether there was a significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the students in the experimental group who were taught Turkish Language with active learning models. The difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of the students in the experimental group was found to be statistically significant. The difference between pre-test and post-test scores of the students in the control group in which the Turkish lesson was performed by fulfilling the activities required by the course book in the direction of national education achievements was found statistically meaningless. Descriptive analysis method, one of the qualitative data analyses, was used in the analysis of the interviews made by teachers and students through semi-structured interview form and the observation forms developed by the researcher. In the results of the analysis of quantitative data, it is concluded that the active learning model applied in the 7th grade Turkish lesson is influential on the students' critical thinking tendencies. When the data obtained from the individual interviews made using the semi-structured interview form in the experimental group were analyzed, the students stated that their interest and motivation have increased thanks to the Turkish lessons they have learned using the active learning model, the students also expressed that their social communication and interaction skills have improved, their mental thinking processes have been affected positively and they encountered different learning approaches throughout the application process and they were in a more researcher and inquisitive attitude while learning the topics. In the interviews with the practicing teacher regarding the same process, the teacher stated that the students in the application process increased their attention, motivation and self-confidence. On the other hand, the teacher stated that during this process he applied various activities to develop the students' mental thinking processes and the teacher himself played various roles and the application process contributed to his professional career as well.