Investigation of the effect of global connections learnings activities on metacognitive awareness of gifted students

Gifted students have high-level skills such as creative thinking, reflective thinking, multiple thinking, critical thinking and metacognitive thinking. These skills, which manifest themselves in the cognitive field, are rare in the society. In the field of social sciences, gifted students who are sensitive to social and global problems have a high level of interest in these issues and motivation to learn. In a field where their motivation is high, it is very important to teach in accordance with their learning needs with a differentiated programme. In this general framework, the aim of the study is to examine the effect of activities on metacognitive awareness of gifted students on global issues in the global connections learning area differentiated according to the parallel education programme. This research was designed according to the sequential, dominant status design of the mixed method. It was applied in two phases in which quantitative data were obtained first and then qualitative data were obtained, in which quantitative method was dominant. In the study, single group pretest-posttest design was used in the application process of the quantitative method. In the qualitative dimension, phenomenological design from qualitative research methods was used. "Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (CAI)" was used to measure metacognitive awareness levels in the pre-test post-test applications of the study. In addition, the "Metacognitive Awareness Interview Form" developed by the researcher were used in the qualitative dimension. The research was conducted in Antalya Kepez Science and Art centre (BilSEM) in the 2nd semester of the 2022-2023 academic year. The data collection process (3 weeks) and the implementation process (6 weeks) lasted 9 weeks. Before the application, the metacognitive awareness inventory was applied to 120 6th grade gifted students. Among 120 gifted students whose metacognitive awareness levels were measured, 30 students were selected with the criterion sampling method of purposive sampling and the experimental group was formed. In order to increase the metacognitive awareness of the experimental group students, activities on "solar storm, children's rights, women's rights, deforestation, global warming and migration" were applied within the scope of global connections learning area differentiated according to the parallel education model. In order to elaborate the quantitative data, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 students in the experimental group. Quantitative data were analysed using SPSS Data Analysis software. Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used in data analysis and significance level .05 was accepted. Descriptive analysis was used for qualitative data. As a result of the application, it was seen that there was a significant difference in favour of the experimental group between the pretest and posttest scores of the differentiated global connections learning domain activities according to the parallel education model in the main dimensions of knowledge of cognition and organisation of cognition and in the sub-dimensions of explanatory knowledge, procedural knowledge, situational knowledge, planning, monitoring, evaluation, debugging and knowledge management of gifted students. Qualitative data also support the quantitative data.