Abstract:

With the discipline of geography in the Social Studies course, it is aimed that students get to know the place they live in correctly and benefit from it consciously. For this purpose, spatial thinking skills should be gained from the first year of secondary school education. In this study, the opinions of 5th and 8th grade students and social studies teachers in a secondary school about spatial thinking skills were tried to be revealed. In this study, in which case study from qualitative research designs was used, semi-structured interviews with eighteen students and two Social Studies teachers determined according to the results of the activity-based test prepared by Gonulaçar were used as a data collection tool. According to the findings, it was observed that map reading, location, spatial skills of secondary school students were not sufficiently developed, whereas their observation, natural and technological direction-finding skills were relatively developed. Teachers, on the other hand, were found to be far from teaching methods and techniques to improve these skills, and that they only used in-class technological devices to teach skills and were distant to outside-class activities.

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