The effect of using legend in social studies teaching on the students' academic achievements and attitudes towards the course

Literature is among the artistic works that people have used to communicate with each other throughout history. As it is known, literature is defined as the art in which people express their feelings, thoughts and dreams verbally and in writing through language. It is stated that one of the important purposes of literature is to educate and provide people with knowledge, skills, values and attitudes. Undoubtedly, literature uses various literary works to achieve this goal, and legends are one of them. In the most general sense, legends are extraordinary stories that tell about the lives and behaviors of religious leaders or famous historical figures. It can be said that using legends in teaching-learning activities helps students to acquire ideas about the lives, feelings and thoughts of important religious and state leaders and contribute to the development of their national and moral values by taking them as models. Although it is a literary product that can be easily used in social studies lessons, the related literature showed that there are some limitations in terms of quality and quantity in studies on the use of legends in social studies teaching. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of using legend in social studies teaching on students' academic success and attitudes towards the course. This study used mixed method, in this context a quasi-experimental design was used in the quantitative part of the study and phenomenology was used in the qualitative part of it. The study group of the study consisted of in total 28 students, studying at a public middle school in the city center of Kocaeli in the 2022-2023 academic year. "Academic Achievement Test", "Attitude Scale Towards Social Studies Course", "Structured Interview Form" and "Student Diaries" were used as data collection tools in the study. The collected data were analyzed with two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), descriptive and content analysis. As a result of the study, it was revealed that using legends in social studies teaching increased students' academic achievements and enabled them to develop positive attitudes towards the course. In this regard, based on the study results, some suggestions have been made for social studies teacher training institutions, social studies teachers and social studies education researchers.