Investigation of the effect of cooperative learning method on the development of vocabulary and towards Turkish lecture in elementary school second year

The purpose of the research is to determine the effects of student teams – success classes, which is a part of the collaborative learning methods, while teaching Turkish and to identify whether it has any effect on improving the vocabularies of the second grade elementary students while also seeing if it has any influence on their attitudes towards the classes. The research is modelled to follow the quantitative approaches. Accordingly, on the research a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design control group is used. Study group of this research consists of a group of 10 experimental and 10 control students, in total 20 students in the 2016-2017 school year in the city of Kocaeli, Kandıra district based 2 quarter/village school's second year students. The independent variable of the experimental group is an experimental provision corresponding to the student teams – success classes technique based on the collaborative learning in teaching the lessons. The independent variable of the control group is a provision corresponding to the traditional techniques while teaching lessons. The dependant variable of both groups is the effects of these different teaching methods on the success levels of the students while learning new words and their attitudes towards the Turkish lectures. Data of the research is collected on; personal information forms, the 30 words that were taught, the texts those words appeared on, activity papers, personal improvement exams, a multiple choice exam about the words and the attitude scales towards the Turkish lectures. In the first week of this 8 week-long research, the achievement test and the scale for the attitude towards Turkish lectures were applied to both groups as a pre-test. The following 6 weeks, the 30 selected words were attempted to be taught to the student 5 words every week by using the student teams – success classes method on the experimental group and the traditional teaching methods on the control group. On the 8th week of the research, an achievement test and the scale of attitude towards Turkish lectures were re-applied as the post-test. The research data was analysed using the frequency analysis and crosstab techniques while non-parametric tests were analysed using Wilcoxon ordinal numbers and Mann-Whitney U Test. At the end of the analysis, it is determined that the success of students of both groups have improved while the student teams – success classes method helped the experimental group to improve more in learning new words. About the attitude towards the Turkish lectures, both the experimental and the control group students' attitudes hasn't shown any increase. However, the students on the experimental group using student teams – success classes method had better attitudes.