The effect of Turkish lesson activities designed with dystopian children's literature texts on 7th grade students' reading comprehension, problem solving and creative thinking skills

This study aims to examine the effects of Turkish lesson activities prepared using dystopian children's literature texts on 7th-grade students' reading comprehension, problem-solving and creative thinking skills. . The research design is an explanatory sequential design from mixed research methods. The study was conducted on a total of 40 seventh-grade students, 23 female and 17 male, who were studying in an official middle school in Muş province in the 2023-2024 academic year. Within the scope of the study, 8 different dystopian-themed children's literature works were selected for middle school students and based on these works, 8-week activities were created to cover the four basic language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The effects of the activities prepared by focusing on one dystopian children's literature work each week on students' reading comprehension, problem-solving and creative thinking skills were examined. Pre-test and post-test applications were made in the first and last weeks of the process. In this process, "Narrative Text I Achievement Test" developed by Kökçü (2019) to measure reading comprehension skills, "Problem Solving Inventory for Children" developed by Serin, Bulut Serin, and Saygılı (2010) to measure problem-solving skills, "How creative are you?" scale from Whetton and Cameron (2002) to measure creative thinking skills, "How creative are you?" scale adapted into Turkish by Aksoy (2004), semi-structured interview forms and semi-structured observation form were used as data collection tools. Quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS (version 25) package program and qualitative data were analyzed with content analysis method. The findings show that Turkish language course activities enriched with dystopian children's literature texts positively affect students' reading comprehension, problem-solving, and creative thinking skills.