Effect of the Science Education Program with the Activities in the Out-of-School Learning Environments on the Science Process Skills of the 60-72 Months Old Children

Abstract

The aim of the research was to examine the effect of the “Science Education Program with the Activities in the Out-of-School Learning Environments” on the science process skills of the children. 80 children the ages of which varied between 60 and 72 months who attended three different kindergartens, affiliated to the Republic of Turkey Ministry of National Education, in Ankara in 2015-2016 school year were included in the group of the research which had a quasi-experimental design and a pretest-posttest non-equivalent control group model. "Science Education Program with the Activities in the Out-of-School Learning Environments" with two parts including in and out-of-school learning environments was prepared by the researchers to reveal the effect of the science activities performed in the out-of-school environments such as science centers, nature history museum, aquarium, planetarium, veterinary anatomy museum, school garden beside the in-class science activities in preschool period. Before applying the program, the pretest assessments were performed and it was determined that the science process skills levels of the groups were similar to each other. The science activities of the program performed both in-class and out-of-school were applied in the experimental group-1 and only the in-class activities of the program were applied in the experimental group-2 for seven weeks. In the control group, the teacher continued to perform the 2013 Preschool Education Program activities of the Ministry of National Education. The data was collected by the "Child-Parent Personal Information Form", "Science Process Skills Observation Form" and "Assessment Form of Science Process Skills of Preschool Children" prepared by Uludağ (2017). Frequency, mean, standard deviation and skewness and kurtosis coefficients, Kruskal Wallis Test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and Mann-Whitney U Test were used in the analysis of the data. As a result of the research, it was determined that the program supported the science process skills of children positively.