The effect of project based learning approach to high school students' level of creative thinking, problem solving, taking academic risk

This study's aim is to search the significant effect of Project Based Learning used in 10th class' Biology lesson to the student's ability of creative thinking, problem solving and level of taking academic risk. It has been studied with totally 188 students in High School during the 2010-2011 academic year. The study is carried out quantitatively and has been designed in accordance with the pre-test and post-test and experiment and control group design.For this study, 77 students in experimental group and 111 students in control group have been choosen randomly. The unit " Ecosystem Ecology" are handled in experimental group by using Project Based Learning Approach, on the other hand, tradional methods are used in control group. Search results are transferred to SPSS statistic programme. According to the analysises which have been done with Mann Whitney u from non parametric and t tests from parametric, each group's points are compared and it is seen that there is a significant difference in students' achievement in favour of the experimental group and also, there is a great improvement in students' ability of creative thinking, taking academic risk and problem solving in biology lesson.Key words: Project based learning approach, traditional approach, ability of creative thinking, problem solving, level of taking academic risk, biology education.