Abstract:

The study is performed to determine the effects of the concept based learning approach which has been carried out at 8th grade science lesson “Living Things and Energy Interactions” unit, towards students’ environmental attitudes. The study has been carried out with totally 39 students, being 20 of them are the experimental and 19 of them are the control group attending at a public secondary school in Samsun. The control group has been taught by existing practices and the experimental group has been taught by the concept based learning approach practices formed considering the learning attainments as part of the unit. Environmental attitude scale (five point Likert) consisting 25 questions and qualitative measurement instrument 9 semi-structured open ended questions have been applied to the experimental and control groups before and after the practices. The data acquired from the environmental attitude scale have been analysed using SPSS 17.0 programme, qualitative data have been evaluated by content analyses.  As a result, analyses acquired from the environmental attitude scale it has been determined that there is no significant difference between the experimental group which has been applied context based learning approach and control group about environmental attitudes. In addition, when evaluated the data collected by open-ended questions, it has been determined that there are differences between before and after learning in either the experimental group or the control group and there are changes in each group towards carrying out scientific evaluations instead of personnel and emotional evaluations which has been carried out before learning.

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