The effect of mobile planetarium on 7th grade middle school students' learning of some astronomy concepts and their attitudes towards astronomy

In this study, it was aimed to investigate the effect of mobile planetarium on 7th grade middle school students' learning of astronomy subjects in "Solar System and Beyond: Space Puzzle" unit and their attitudes towards astronomy. The research was conducted in a middle socioeconomic leveled public primary school in Adana province, in the academic year 2016-2017. In the study, semi - experimental design with pretest - posttest control group was used and experimental and control groups were established to test the effectiveness of mobile planetarium. A total of 89 students participated in the study, 44 were in the control group and 45 were in the experimental group. To measure the achievement of students on astronomy issues, a 22-item "Academic Achievement Test" prepared by the researcher was used; and to measure students' attitudes towards astronomy, a 34-item "Astronomy Attitude Scale" of the five-point Likert type developed by Zeilik and colleagues (1999) and adapted to Turkish by Uçar and Demircioğlu (2011) was used. The current instruction method was used in the control group. In experimental group in addition to the traditional methods, one week after the end of the unit, a mobile planetarium system was brought to the students' school and they were provided to participate in the demonstrations related to the the subjects in the unit. The scales were implemented to both group students as pre test and post test at the beginning and at the end of the unit. IBM SPSS (Statistical Packet for Social Sciences) 22.0 program was used to analyze the data. Data from the achievement test and the attitude scale were analyzed using the t-test. Analyzes showed that mobile planetarium is more effective in the students' learning of astronomy subjects in the unit in this research than traditional methodology. In the attitudes towards astonomy, the attitude scores of the experimental group students were higher than the control group students in all dimensions of the scale, but this difference is not statistically significant.