The effect of interdisciplinary analogy based teaching on students learning level in primary education

The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of interdisciplinary analogy based teaching on the quality of learning of primary school students having different levels of academic successes related to science and technology courses.This research is supported by the experimental model with pretest-posttest control groups, constituting one of the real trial models. The experimental application was carried out in the Şükrünailipaşa Primary School located in the center of İnegöl, Bursa, in the spring semester of 2009-2010 academic year. 104 eight-grade students from four different classes of this school constitute the study group of the research. Two of these classes constitute the experimental groups and the other two classes constitute the control groups of the research. In the experimental groups, analogy based teaching whose effectiveness is tested in the research was carried out, and in the control groups, constructivist approach based teaching application was conducted.The data of the research were obtained by ?The Structure and Features of the Material Test? which was improved by the researcher, and whose reliability and validity control studies were carried out. Also, this test consists of 40 multiple choice questions related to fourteen acquisitions about the structure and features of the material chapter in eighth classes? science and technology course.In the analysis of the data that were gathered in the research, the mean, standard deviation and paired sample t test were used and the influence magnitude values for the learning level of the groups were calculated. In statistical analysis, the level of significance was accepted 0.05.At the end of this research, it was observed that the interdisciplinary analogy based teaching application was statistically effective in learning levels of students having high level of academic success as well as in increasing their learning capacity to a great extent. Moreover, the interdisciplinary analogy based teaching has an impact on the quality of students? learning in the experimental group bearing the students having low level of academic success. When the results of the low and high level of academic success bearing students are compared, the other information derieved from the research is the fact that interdisciplinary analogy based teaching is much more effective on the students with high level of academic success when compared to the ones with low level of academic success.In this research, the results obtained from the control groups in which the constructivist approach based teaching was applied are as follows: Constructivist approach based teaching application has had effects on the learning levels of students with low level of academic success. However, when the magnitude of the impact is considered, interdisciplinary analogy based teaching has a much higher effect on the students? learning levels than constructivist approach based teaching.Keywords: Analogy, Interdisciplinary Analogy Based Teaching, Constructivist Teaching Approach, Learning Level.