Search

This study aims at determining whether there were differences in the critical thinking skills of 6th-grade students with whom different metacognitive reading strategies were implemented in Turkish language courses. The Mixed research methodology was adopted that consists of quantitative and qualitative methods. Critical thinking applications in the control group of the study took place according to the Turkish language curriculum, whereas the applications in the experimental group were conducted through SQ4R (survey, question, read, recite, record, and review) and Interactive Read Aloud (IRA) strategies. In the quantitative part of the study, 95 students from 3 different classes attended the practice for 8 weeks, while in the qualitative part semi-structured interviews were held with 32 students in the experimental group. Quantitative data was analyzed on SPSS 22 software package, and MAXQDA 12 software program was employed for the analysis of qualitative data. It was concluded, upon a comparison of post-test scores of students who were taught the SQR4 strategy and the IRA strategy with the scores of those in the control group, that there was a significant difference in favor of the students who applied the IRA strategy in which the teacher acts as a model. No significant difference was observed between the teacher-guided experimental group applying the SQ4R strategy and the control group. Both quantitative and qualitative findings support this conclusion. All students from the IRA experimental group who participated in interviews stated that the strategy applied improved their critical thinking skills in different aspects, whereas most of the students in the SQ4R group stated that the strategy applied did not contribute to their skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's communication possibilities bring along directive communication. Certain groups, institutions, or people can use communication to persuade for their special purposes. When Turkish main language curriculums were examined, even though the persuasive writing takes place at the elementary school level, it does not take place at the secondary school level. Contrary to this situation in Turkey, in the main language curriculums of many countries such as South Korea, China Hong-Kong, Singapore, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and the USA there is a systematic and important place at elementary and secondary school level for persuasive writing. In this research, moving from the lack of this writing skill at secondary school level, an action research process based on the question "How can the persuasive writing skills of 6th-grade students in secondary school be improved in Turkish lesson?" was carried out. For this purpose, a persuasive writing education program was prepared using a process - based writing model. This program was applied 15 weeks (34 class hours) in a class of 18 students and the effect of the program on the students was followed. Research questions are as follows: 1. What is the opinion of students about persuasion before persuasive writing education? 2. What is the effect of persuasive writing education on the ability of students to create the persuasive text? 3. How is the relationship between persuasive text analysis and persuasive text creation? 4. What are the views of students about persuasive writing education? 5. What are the problems encountered in the research process? The data in the study were obtained from student products, evaluation rubric for persuasive text, analysis texts, checklist, student and researcher diary. In data analysis SPSS 23 and NVivo- 11-Pro programs were used. In the direction of the findings, text creation and text analysis ability of 6th-grade students developed in the process and that there is a meaningful relationship between these skills. Moreover, it was seen that students did not succeed at the expected level in applying "counter opinions" and "source" items of persuasive expression in the process of text creation and text analysis, and there was no significant progress with the education process in "spelling" and "punctuation". On the other hand, it has been found that students are "good" level for "elaboration", " "transition words" and "very good" level for "title", "introduction", "development", "result", "thesis", "supporting opinions", "emotional orientation", "repeat", "call", "justification", "requirement statements". After analyses of researcher and student diaries, the themes have been reached that can increase productivity in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]