The effect of middle school 6th grade social studies course supported by digital story and educational game on the students' academic success, attitudes to the course and social skills

One of the main objectives of the social studies course is to train active and productive individuals. In order to train them, there is a big need for activities and learning environments equipped with various visual and auditory materials, contemporary teaching models, strategies, methods and techniques are used. The relevant literature showed that digital story and educational game are among these mentioned student-centered teaching methods. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of middle school 6th grade social studies course supported by a digital story and an educational game on students' academic achievement, attitudes towards the course and social skills. Explanatory sequential design was used in the research, which was carried out using the mixed research method in which quantitative and qualitative methods were considered together. This study used explanatory sequential design of mixed research method. In the quantitative phase, the quasi-experimental design with pre-test/post-test control group was employed, and for the qualitative phase, the phenomenology method was engaged. The study group of the study consisted of 59 middle school 6th grade students studying in a school of Erzurum city center in the second term of the 2020-2021 academic year. There were three groups in the study, two randomly and purposeful sampling selected experimental and a control group. In all groups, middle school 6th grade social studies textbook prepared in line with the objectives of "Active Citizenship" Theme of 2018 Social Studies Curricula and teaching-learning activities based on 5E model were used. In addition, digital story was employed in the experimental-1 group and educational game was engaged in the experimental-2 group. The data were collected through "Active Citizenship Theme Academic Achievement Test", "Social Studies Course Attitude Scale", "Social Skills Scale" and semi-structured interviews. For the analysis of the quantitative data, inferential statistics were used and as a result of the normal distribution of the data, dependent samples t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used. On the other hand, qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis. The results of the study revealed that the increase in the academic achievement, attitude and skill levels of the students was mostly in favor of the experimental-1 group in which the digital story method was used, followed by the experimental-2 group in which the educational game method was employed. The results of control group students were at lower levels than the students in the experimental groups.