مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - The Effect of Educational Interfaces on the Critical Thinking and the Academic Achievement

Abstract :

The main purpose of this study is to examine if there is a significant difference between the experiment group which uses instructional software packages that were supported by educational interface with subject based critical thinking feature and the control group which uses instructional software packages that were supported by educational interface without subject based critical thinking feature in the Science course of secondary school 6th grade students’ critical thinking skills and their academic achievement. The study was designed according to pre- test post-test control group design. The study group is a total of 50 sixth-grade students who study in a secondary school in Kahramanmaraş province center. The participants of both experiment and control groups answered the academic achievement test which serves as pre-test and post-test, critical thinking rubric and semi-structured interview questions. The data obtained during the study were analyzed via the SPSS 20,0 statistical analysis software package program. After providing arithmetic mean and standard deviation of data in a descriptive way, independent samples t-test and covariance analysis (ANCOVA) were conducted. The results of the study indicate that the critical thinking skills of the students in the experiment group which uses instructional software packages that were supported by educational interface with subject based critical thinking feature have increased, therefore in order to obtain more extensive information related to this, it can be suggested to design and test similar software for different school levels, different disciplines and different class levels.