Tez özetleri Astronomi ve Uzay Bilimleri Anabilim Dalı 2

The Effect of Web Based Learning Supported by Creativity Improving Activities on Students’ Achievement and Creativity

This study is aimed to design activities that improve creative thinking skills and to observe the effects of this teaching method supported by these improved activities on students’ academic successes and their creativity in an web-based learning environment, which is an another type of distance education. Within this direction, an authentic course content is formed targeting to improve the students’ high level thinking skills by differentiating the objectives of ‘The Numerals’ learning domain in Math courses of 6th grade primary school level.
Pretest-posttest control group experimental design which is a type of experimental model was used in the study. The study is held with a number of 124, 6th grade students having their education in Orhangazi Primary School between 2012-2013 school year. In the context of the research, four classes are chosen with the method of randomly assigning. Traditional teaching methods and techniques are applied to the two of the classes while the other two are treated with the web based teaching method. In addition to that, in each one of the classes which is treated with both the web based and traditional teaching methods, the activities, designed by the researcher to improve the students’ creative thinking skills, are applied. The activities used in the study are prepared in accordance with the interviews made with the experts in the field of creativity.
The data of the research are gathered via Torrance Creative Thinking Test Verbal Forms of A and B, and the academic success tests and interview forms, designed by the researcher. The convenience of the quantitative data of the study to the normal distribution is defined with the statistics of Shapiro Wilk W test. In order to analyze the normal distribution data, Dependent and Independent Samples T-Test of the Parametric Tests are used and for the data, not showing a normal distribution, non-parametric tests of Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed Rank test are used. The qualitative data of the study is analyzed with Nvivo 10 program and presented in the graphics according to the frequency of repetition and percentiles.
According to the findings of the study, web based learning improves the academic achievements and creativities when compared to the traditional teaching methods. And it is also observed that the creativity improving activities, used in the classrooms educated with the traditional methods, affect the academic achievement and creativity positively, too. Together with these, it is defined that the academic achievement and the creativity is best enhanced with the web based learning environment supported with the creative activities. The results of the study show us that web based learning is an effective way of improving high level thinking skills and this effect is considered to be strengthened through the creativity improving activities.