Effects of using document in history teaching to students historical thinking skills and successes

In this research, development of students? historical thinking skills and increasing their academic successes have been mentioned related to using document in history lessons in high schools. Quantitative and qualitative research methods have been used together in this study. As quantitative research method, experimental design, with experimental-control group,and also as a qualitative research method historical texts of students? works written in their practice process are interpreted with descriptive analysed method .This study?s application phase has been applied in Prof. Dr. Şevket Reşit Hatipoğlu High school with 76 ( seventy six ) students in Yenimahalle, Ankara for 5 ( five ) weeks ( through ten lessons ). The application was maintained with 11. class Turkish Republic Revolution History and Kemalizm lesson?s battles and results subjects in the part of independence war.While using historical documents with student centered approach, lessons have been running in application group,on the other hand, lessons have run in classical style with lesson books centered.Before the application, control and experimental groups, totally 76 students, have had a foretext achievement text and a quastionaire to determine the social ? economical status of the students and personal knowledges and a foretext test was written without giving historical documents to notice the historical thinking skills of the groups. At the begining of the application, a presentation was done to the experimental group about kinds of historical documents, using document samples, items, etc. During the process of application, experimental group had been taught lessons, especially with using first and second hand source of documents ( especially written sources). After the application process, post test- achievement test was applied to the experimental and control groups and a test, to make them write a post text to determine the development of historical thinking skills by giving documents, was applied.At the end of the application quantitative results attained by using SPSS 15.0 data analysis programme, and qualitative datas attained by using descriptive analysis have been evaluated and annotated. According to quantitative results, statistically in favour of experiment group, there is a meaningful difference between experimental group which had education with historical documents and control group that had traditional education with lesson books. According to qualitative results, teaching history using historical documents affected experimental group?s students? historical thinking skills more than control group?s students? in a positive way. After the application, it was concluded that the documents were used more effectively by experimental group than the control group.At the end of the research, suggestions of the researcher are mentioned based on results of the research.Key words: History, history teaching, first hand writen documents, second hand written documents, historical thinking, skill, academic achievement.