The effects of visual art supported inquiry based science activities on 5th grade students' scientific process skills

Abstract

The study aimed to investigate the effects of visual art supported inquiry based science education on 5th grade students' scientific process skills (SPS). In the research, one group pretest-posttest experimental design is used. The study was carried out with the help of 20 5th grade students. For the purpose of the research, an education including inquiry based activities (IBA) and visual art based activities (VABA) was designed and applied. The education applied during this study contains 7 IBAs, 5 VABAs. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected during this implementation. While the quantitative data was gathered by SPS Test, the qualitative data was gathered by unstructured observations. For analyzing the data gathered by SPS Test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used. For analyzing the unstructured observation data, content analysis was used. Based on the data gathered from the study, it can be said that visual art supported inquiry based science education contributes to improve students' observation, inference, determining variables and designing experiment skills, while it contributes limitedly to improve comparison-classification, prediction, estimation, measuring, collecting knowledge and data, data processing and forming a model and interpreting data skills. It does not, however, contribute to improve recognizing and using experiment materials and instruments, recording data and presentation skills.