Investigation of conceptual understanding of middle school 5th grade students in matter and change unit via concept cartoons

This study, was aimed to investigate the conceptual understanding of middle school 5th grade students via concept cartoons in Matter and Change Unit. The study group consisted of 12 students in the 5th grade of a middle school in the district of Kocaali in Sakarya province. The research was designed according to single group pretest - posttest weak-experimental design of the quantitative research methods. Here, the independent variable is the course content teached by the concept cartoons based on the 5E model and the dependent variable is the conceptual understanding of the students. The concept cartoons used in the study were prepared by the researcher. The data collection tools used in the study are the Conceptual Understanding Test (CUT) that has reliability coefficient of (Cronbach's Alpha value) 0.717 and was developed by the researcher and The Word Association Test (WAT) consisting of 10 key concepts prepared by the researcher in relation to 5th grade Matter and Change unit. These tests, which were used in the research and evaluation process of students' conceptual understanding, were performed as pre-test and post-test before and after the application to the students in the single group. Thus, the concepts and the relationship the students establish between them has been tried to be examined through the word association test, and the conceptual comprehension test was used to evaluate how close these associations were to the meaningful and scientifically correct ones. The quantitative data obtained from the conceptual understanding test used as pre-test and post-test were analyzed using SPSS 23 program. Firstly, the data were tested for normality, then Dependent Samples t-Test was performed. The analysis of the word association pre-test and post-test data was done in accordince to frequencies of response words, the formation of concept networks between responses and the presence of the correlation coefficients. It was observed that all students' conceptual understanding post test scores were higher than the pre-test scores and also the mean score of the conceptual understanding post test was higher than the pre-test mean score. After the Paired Student t-Test regarding the conceptual comprehension pretest and posttest scores of the research, a significant difference was found in favor of the posttest. A significant difference was found between the pretest and posttest scores of the group. In the word association post test, it was seen that the number of response words given to the key concepts were increased as compared to pre test. In the post test concept network, the key concepts' relevance to themselves and to other response words, and the relation of the response words with themselves increased compared to the pre-test concept network. The data collection tools used in the study, such as word association test and conceptual comprehension test were found to be compatible with each other. Furthermore, in the post test where the relatedness coefficients between key concepts was also calculated, an increase was observed compared to the relatedness coefficients of the pre-test. It was concluded that the use of concept cartoons positively affected the students' conceptual understanding.