Determination of local geographical knowledge levels of students in social studies

Today, the state of globalization is moving away people from the environment they live and opening the doors of the world do not know. Although this situation is good in a way, it causes the lack of interest in among the environment they live. With this period of globalization, it is understood how geography is important for people who detach from the environment and front to the environment they live again. The basic of this effect is the beginning of the social studies course in primary schools and the subject of high school geography. In this context revealing the status of awareness of the geographic elements in an environment where the students live together with globalization and globalized a information consist of the aim of the research. In this research by establishing a success test, it was reached 1577 secondary school students and 38 social studies teachers who work in Kırıkkale province. In this context, mixed research method was used in the research. In the research, students are classified according to their class level 6., 7., 8. Class village, town and city according to their province and teacher are classified as village, town and city according to their province. The data obtained from the research were processed by using SPSS 17 and Microsoft Excel and interpreted according to the t-Test and One Way Anova results. In the light of the data obtained from the study, the geographical information of the students towards to environment they live in at medium level. At the same time, a significant difference was found in favor of female students according to gender variable from the sub-variables created in the study, and it was observed that the information about students' environment increased as the class level increased. However, there was no significant difference between grade 7 and grade 6 there was a significant difference between in Grade 8 and Grade 6. According to the place of residence variable, the students in the province have the highest level of knowledge about the environment they live in, and it followed by village and town students. Here there was a significant difference in favor of city in city-town variable and favor of village town-village variable. According to the average score of the students in the social studies course, the students who have high social sciences score at the end of the year have high level of knowledge about the environment they live in, and the students who have lower social sciences lesson year-end score have lower environmental knowledge level. According to the sub-disciplines of the social studies of the students, the level of knowledge of the students who are interested in history discipline is the highest and this is ranked by the students who have interest in other social studies disciplines like archelogy philosophy and sociology. At the same time students have the highest success average in the location "questions" related to the environment they live in and this is flowed by "physical geography" and "human geography" questions. In the research, although both students and teachers stated they were informed about the environment they lived, there was a rational difference between two groups the majority of the teachers stated that they give information about the environment. Together with this it was observed that, both the students and the teachers did not participate in the trip-observation-research activities towards to the environment they live in. In addition to determining that such activities were not done sufficiently in schools, the students who participated in the tour-observation-research activities for the environment they lived in were not able to pass this to the success test. The quality of the exploration-observation-research activities in schools should be increased, and the logic of look-see-late should be removed. Although the placement of our city in the secondary education is considered to be a positive development, the lack of adequate resources may cause it to lose its effectiveness ass elective course.