Investigation of the learning levels of 7th grade students in a blended learning environment (İzmir province -Karşıyaka district Eren Şahin Eronat Secondary School example)

Rapid developments in information and communication technologies in recent years have become indispensable in the field of education as in many areas of life. Information and communication technologies are frequently used in teaching environments, both in distance education and in formal education environments. Thanks to distance education technologies, the opportunity to receive education independently of time and space allows the individual to benefit more from educational services. The fact that formal education depends on time and space has made distance education an important alternative. However, distance education; it lacks very important factors such as teacher-student and student-student interaction in formal education. In this context, blended learning environments, which are organized in such a way that the advantages of formal education and distance education can be used together, are becoming more and more important. There are difficulties in learning due to prejudices about science courses, fear of failure or low motivation. It is thought that these problems can be eliminated by using blended learning environment. In this context, it is very important to determine how research will add innovation to science and science teaching and also how blended learning environments can be used to gain cognitive, affective and psycho-motor skills and how much they can contribute to these skills. For this reason, in this study, it is aimed to reveal the effects of blended learning environment on the academic achievements, science learning skills, satisfaction and opinions of the 7th grade students in the "Force and Energy" unit within the scope of Science course. This research, which was carried out in the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year in Izmir, was carried out with the participation of 73 seventh grade students, 32 of whom were in the experimental and 41 in the control group. During the six weeks, the "Force and Energy" unit was taught in the classroom designated as an experimental group, and in the classroom designated as a control group, it was taught with the existing Science education curriculum. In the collection of the quantitative data of the research, the pretest-posttest semi-experimental pattern was used, and the "Academic Achievement Test", "Science Learning Skill Scale" for the "Force and Energy" unit, and "Student Satisfaction towards the Blended (Mixed) Learning Environment for the experimental group students in the post-test. Scale was collected with "Data. The qualitative data of the research was collected with the help of an open-ended questionnaire. In the analysis of the quantitative data of the research, necessary statistical analyzes were made using the SPSS program. In the research, "Mann-Whitney U Test" was used to test the difference between the academic achievement test scores for the experimental and control groups, and the "Wilcoxon Signed-Rows Test" was used to evaluate the groups within themselves. In addition, "t-test for Independent Samples" in order to test the meaningful difference between experiment and control groups for the data of the "Science Learning Skill Scale" which is normally distributed; "T-test for Dependent Samples" was used to make evaluations within the groups themselves. Content analysis was applied in the analysis of the qualitative data of the research. According to the findings obtained from the quantitative data of the research; A statistically significant difference was observed between the post-test academic achievement scores of the experimental group and the post-test academic achievement scores of the control group in favor of the experimental group students (p <.05). A significant difference was found in the success test permanence scores applied to both groups in favor of the experimental group. This finding showed that learning in the blended learning environment is more permanent. In terms of science learning skills, a significant difference was found between the post-test scores of both groups in favor of the experimental group (p <.05). According to the satisfaction scale applied to the experimental group students, the students stated that they were happy to attend the classes in a blended learning environment. According to the findings obtained from the qualitative data of the research; They stated that the lessons taught in the blended learning environment are fun, understandable, interesting and easy to understand. All the findings obtained from the research showed that science lessons taught in blended learning environment had a positive effect on students' academic success and science learning skills. Key words: Blended Learning, Academic Achievement, Science Learning Skill, Science Education