The effect of the use of lesson diary from the learning-purpose writing activities on the retention and achievement of student in social studies course

The current research aims to determine the effect of the use of the lesson diary on the academic achievement of the students in the teaching of our country and the world unit which is taught in the 6th grade of social studies course. For this study presented, pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental research design with control group, which is one of the quantitative research methods, is preferred. In addition, the study group of the research consists of 62 students (31 control group students and 31 experimental group students) studying in the 6th grade at a secondary school of a province in Eastern Anatolia in 2016-2017 academic year. In the middle school, which has four sixth grade branches in total, the selection of the groups is made randomly with two expert teachers. 31 control group students form branch A and 31 experimental group students form branch C. During the study phase, after the teacher had teached each outcome, the students were instructed to write the lesson diaries that evening and asked to bring it back to the teacher. The teacher stated that he/she would evaluate these diaries and give the students a performance score at the end of the semester. The researcher received and evaluated the course diaries written at the end of each outcome related to the unit. As a result of this, when the course diaries were written, it was claimed from the researcher's experimental group that students should use academic language, establish a relationship with daily life, pay attention to the page-setting, and write their academic process skills using scientific steps. During this period, the control group students were not given any activity, and the control group students were asked to solve only test questions related to the unit being taught. The data of the research; both before and after test procedure, a 25-item multiple-choice achievement test was administered to both the experimental group and the control group among the questions asked in the Free Boarding and Scholarship and Leveling exams selected by a researcher, a faculty member and a teacher. In the analysis of the data obtained as a result of the tests applied to the experimental group and the control group, the independent groups t-test was used. SPSS-22 package program was used to analyze the data. When the pre-test and post-test results, the first phase of the study, were analyzed, a significant success was obtained in favor of the experimental group. Likewise, when the post-test results were compared to the students in the study, it was concluded that the experimental group students were more successful than the control group students. In addition, the retention test, which was applied after the six-week break, supported this situation in favor of the experimental group students. At the end of the study, it was concluded that keeping a diary for the experimental group students from the activities of Learning-purpose Writing in Social Studies course contributed positively to their academic success when compared to the control group students.