The effect of using reflective and critical thinking teaching activities to academic achievement of students in 7th grade social studies class in the education of human rights, democracy, citizenship, respect for diversity and tolerance earnings

Abstract

That innovations and changes made without changing people’s basic ideas and believes about teaching and learning in the education system fail is a fact known by everyone. It is seen that there is a need especially for reflective and critical thinking supported activities in the educational activities in order to turn negative happenings into positive. In this study, inferences and predictions are made depending on what kind of data will be obtained after the application of reflective and critical thinking teaching activities in transferin what is taught to real life and in teaching subjets which will never be out of date in social studies education like citizenship, human rights, respect for diversity and tolerance. With the activities that conducted, it is intended for students to understand the subject better with teaching activities, except rote one and readings, by aiming to create different perspectives of students on issues. As a result of this study, the student’s learning transferred issues and concepts that are mentioned in the subjects and increasing their internalization levels have also importance. According to the results of this method, a questioning based education program can be prepared in all disciplines at the scope of social studies. Thus, understanding of social studies based on critical and reflective thinking can be developed. The development of this is not enough; also projects about these works can be produced for this to be put into practice. As a result of these projects, studies on behalf of giving sufficient importance to social studies can be planned. In the study, in quantitative researches, experimental model is used at the scope of pretest, posttest and following test. The study group is created, in the selection of the participants who take place in study group certain criteria have been paid attention to. A 60 person experiment and control group which consist 30 participants in each from study group is formed. In the forming of the experiment and control group, random disproportionate element sampling method is used. Participants who have similar features in their socio-economic statutes and academic achievement have been tried to select for experiment and control group. Academic achievement test developed by the researchers is applied to experiment and control groups in the form of pre-test and post-test and t test is used by analyzing the obtained results in SPSS program. As a result, it is detected that the levels of learning of experiment and control groups are different from each other. It is seen that participant’s acadeic achievements are higher in the teaching donce by with the reflcetive and critical think activities. © The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology.