Development of Museum Education Activities for Social Studies Course and Evaluation of their Effects on Students' Academic Achievement

Abstract

With the work done in the process, it was tried to raise awareness about museums and to explain how valuable museums are for a new perspective on education and most importantly for the social studies course. In the study, a 2x2 split-plot mixed design was used. In the quantitative part of the study, dependent and independent variable measurements were made on the experimental and control groups. In the qualitative part, semi-structured interview technique was applied. The participants of the research are 50 7th grade students in a public school in the center of Gaziantep in the 2020-2021 academic year. The quantitative data of the study were analyzed with the SPSS 22.00 program, and the Shapiro-Wilk normality test and skewness calculation were performed to find answers to the research questions of the study. Afterwards, the post-test was applied to both groups. As a result of the research, it was determined that museum education, which is one of the out-of-school learning environments for the social studies course, improved the course success level of the students in the experimental group. In addition, the data obtained from the semi-structured interview form reveal important results in terms of revealing the students' thoughts on museum education and its impact and make our research more valuable.