Evaluation of the effectiveness of similaries and differences strategy on the student success in social studies

The main aim of this research is to observe Marzano's Identifying Similarities and Differences Strategy, which is one of Marzano's Essential Instructional Strategies for Effective Teaching. This was done by examining its effect on student's success in "Sources of Our Country "unit in yearly plan of 6th grade's social studies lesson. In this research Experimented Teaching Methodology is used to achieve the goals of the study. It was applied at a private school in Gaziantep. The study group is composed of two groups from 6th grades as an "experiment group" and "control group". The unit was planned to last for 5 weeks and consisted of a pre-test before the instruction, a final-test after the instruction and a retention test 6 weeks after finishing the unit were applied to the students. In addition, open ended exams were applied before and after the instruction to state the changes in student according to the SOLO taxonomy. An experiment and a control group exist for the study, considering success measures 2*3 experimental designs were used. To compare the points of pre-test, final-test and retention tests, repeated measures test was used. According to the test results, when compared with the pre-test results of experiment and control groups, their improvement in final test and retention test results is statistically significant. Differentiation between experiment and control group is statistically insignificant. Open ended test analysis shows that the answers of students are at different levels according to SOLO taxonomy. In addition, more answers exist in one-way and multi-ways structure. When the change in pre-test and final test answers was examined not only a shift to a higher level but also, a shift to a lower level was observed. According to the rates of changes and stability in two groups, the change in experiment groups is more than the control group. The activities also changed students' cognitive structure too.