Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of outdoor educational activities supported by Prediction-Observation-Explanation (POE) in teaching the subject of "Getting to Know the Living Creatures," covered within the scope of the 5th grade "World of Livings" unit, on students' academic achievement and learning retention. Convergent parallel design, one of the mixed research methods, was applied in the study's quantitative dimension in which a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest control group was employed. The workgroup consists of 5th-grade students attending a state secondary school in the district center of a metropolitan city in the Black Sea region in the 2019-2020 academic year. There are 32 students in the experimental group of the study and 30 students in the control group. During the administration of the study, which lasted for four weeks, POE supported outdoor educational activities developed by the researcher were performed in the experimental group following the lesson plans designed according to the 5E learning model; whereas the activities under the current curriculum were performed in the control group in the indoor environment. The study's data collection tool was the "World of Livings Academic Achievement Test," developed by the researcher and took its final form after validity and reliability studies. It was administered as a pre-test, post-test, and learning retention test (four weeks after the activities). SPSS 13.0 statistical program was used to analyze the quantitative data, and "Shapiro-Wilks Analysis" and " Independent Samples t-Test" were employed. In the analysis of qualitative data, frequency and percentage distributions are used in the descriptive analysis. The comparison of the experimental and control groups' scores showed a significant difference in favor of the experimental group. In line with these results, using POE supported outdoor educational activities in teaching the subject of "Getting to Know the Living Creatures" within the scope of the "World of Livings" unit was observed to affect students' academic achievements and learning retention positively.

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