Özet:

Secondary education is an intense and stressful period of education due to its structure, and this period is also the critical developmental stage for adolescents. It is aimed to facilitate their learning in this critical period and support their hormonal, emotional, and social development. Thus, the effect of movement/creative dance on the spatial thinking and mental rotation skills of adolescents was investigated in this study. In this way, it was aimed to raise awareness among students, educators, and parents about the effect of creative dance on the learning and development of adolescents. A mixed-method research model was used for this study. The experimental design with the pretest-posttest control group, which is one of the semi-experimental designs, was employed in the quantitative dimension of the study. The “case study” method was adopted in the qualitative aspect of the study. The study group of the research consisted of students attending the 7th grade at a private school located in the center of Çanakkale Province in the 2018-2019 academic year. One of the five classes in the school was selected as the experimental group and the other as the control group, using the simple random sampling technique. While the number of students in the experimental group was 32, that in the control group was 31. 27 (42.9%) of the students were female and 36 (57.1%) were male. “Creative dance training and spatial thinking/mental rotation skills training” was designed and applied for 6 weeks, 4 hours a week. The data of the study were obtained through the rotation test developed by Vandenberg and Kuse (1978), redesigned by Peters, Laeng, et al. (1995), and adapted into Turkish by the same researchers. MRTA Rotation Test and "semi-structured interview form" prepared by the researcher were used in the study. It was discovered as a result of the study that creative dance education improved students' spatial thinking and mental rotation skills and there was a significant difference between the pre-post test scores of the students and the test scores they obtained from spatial thinking, mental rotation at the end of the experiment, and the time variable. A significant difference was also detected between the spatial thinking and mental rotation measurements carried out at the beginning and end of the experiment in the experimental and control groups. Redesigning the curricula based on movement/dance to promote the cognitive development of students will support their holistic development.

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