Design, implementation and evaluation of the guided materials based on the ?enriched 5e instructional model? for the elementary 8th grade "force and motion" unit

The aim of this study is to develop a student and a teacher guided materials based on 5E teaching model enriched with various teaching learning and techniques for ?Forces and Motion? unit at the elementary 8th grade Science and Technology Curriculum and evaluate the effectiveness of these materials. Quasi-experimental research design was used in this study. Firstly, misconceptions about ?floating?, ?sinking?, ?buoyancy force? and ?pressure? concepts were determined from the related literature. Secondly, the researcher gained experiences in a virtual classroom environment regarding to teaching the related the concepts and designed the research process. Thirdly, the guided materials were prepared by considering the misconceptions and their possible reasons. After that, teaching material, teacher guided material, Two Tiered Test for Determining Differentiation in Conceptual Structure (DDCST), Interview Questions about Concepts (IQC) and semi-structured observation form were developed and the pilot studies were conducted. Finally, the main study was actually performed and the DDCST were applied to the experimental and control groups as pre, post and delayed-post test to determine the differentiation of students? conceptual structure. Moreover, the IQC was conducted with total 12 students in the experimental and control groups who performed low, medium and high levels of conceptual differentiation. The Practice teacher?s and the students? ideas have been taken to determine the effectiveness of the teaching materials during the application process. The statistical analysis of the data obtained from the DDCST showed a significant difference in favor of the experiment group at the post and delayed test (p <0.05) results. It has emerged that the instructional material prepared for this study has actualized the differentiation in the conceptual structure as desired and provided a permanent differentiation in students? minds. The study has been completed with some suggestions offered to the educators and researchers.