Teaching light unit to elementary school students throught argumentation

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of argumentation on 7th grade students? academic achievement of light unit and comparing the results with the traditional instruction method. In addition, investigating the students? level of understanding the nature of science and attitudes towards science .The sample of the study is formed of 63 students studying in two 7th-grade classes in 2009-2010 school year. The sample has been formed through the easily available sampling method and the experimental group and the control group have been determined randomly out of the sample. In the study, the design of pretest- posttest control group, which is a quasi experimental pattern, have been used. The study has been continued totally six weeks 4 hours a week with two classes per week including the applications of pretest-posttest.Beginning of the study, pre-knowledge test, achievement test, understanding the nature of science scale and attitude towards science scale have been used as tools of measurement within for pretest in both the experimental group and control group students. End of the study, achievement test, understanding the nature of science scale and attitude towards science scale have been used as tools of measurement within for posttest in both the experimental group and control group students. The results of the tests have been used as the quantitive data of the study. The evaluation of these quantitive data has been carried out through the SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) computer programme. t test has been used to test the hyphotheses put forward in the study.The statistical analysis of the study has showed that the students in the experimental group, who have had scientific argumentation based instruction, have proved meaningfully better at success in the concept of light when compared with the students traditionally instructed in the control group. Futhermore, a differentiation between the experimental and the control group has been observed, which is siding with the experimental one, concerning the understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge but hasn?t been observed significant differentiation between experimental and control group students' attitudes towards science.