Abstract:

The aim of this research is to set forth the effect of the four corners strategy, which is one of the active learning methods, on the academic success of students by applying it in the 7th-grade social studies course. Within the context of this research, the researcher prepared a lesson plan for the "People, Places, and Environments" chapter in the 7th-grade social studies textbook by using the four corners technique. The semi-experimental design model, which is one of the quantitative research methods was used in the study. The study group of the research consists of 7th-grade students studying in a state secondary school in the city center of Konya in the 2021-2022 academic year. Students in the experimental and control groups were selected according to their previous year's grades. The total number of participants in the research is 47, of whom 24 are in the experimental group and 23 are in the control group. A lecture was delivered to the experimental group using the four corners technique according to the lesson plan prepared by the researcher. On the other hand, a lecture was delivered to the control group by a teacher in a public school according to the program-based teaching method. The academic achievement test prepared by the researcher was administered to both groups as a pre-test before implementation. After 5 weeks of lectures, an academic achievement test was administered as a post-test to both groups. For the academic achievement test prepared by the researcher, item difficulty analysis, item distinctiveness analysis, and reliability (KR-20) analysis were performed. The academic achievement test consists of 25 questions in total. The data obtained after the implementation were analyzed using statistical methods. In order to determine the distribution of the participants according to the experimental and control groups, frequency and percentage analyses were performed. A descriptive analysis was conducted according to the pretest and posttest success scores of the students. The distribution of the data was analyzed with the Shapiro-Wilk test in the analysis of the sub-problems of the research. According to the analysis, it was concluded that the data were normally distributed. An independent sample t-test was used in the determination of the difference between the experimental and control groups. The dependent sample t-test was used to determine the differences between the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental and control groups. As a result, the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental and control groups were compared, and it was determined that there was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group.

Keywords: