Ufuk ÅÄ°MÅEK
Citizenship education requires learner-centered teaching and meaningful curricula. Such pedagogy is characterized by a facilitative, conversational approach. This type of approach can improve students’ communication skills, academic achievements and high-order cognitive and intellectual development. It can engage students to think about the meaning of their personal stories and experiences, and lead to greater participation in lessons. It can create a cooperative learning environment and lead to a more positive self-concept. Student learning and achievement in social studies can be improved with the use of cooperative learning methods. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Group Investigation (GI) and the Reading-Writing-Presenting (RWP) method in cooperative learning on students’ comprehension of citizenship lessons. This research included 145 second-grade students from three classes. For this research, each class was selected to test one teaching method. The first class was selected as the “Group Investigation” Group (n=48), the second was selected as the “Reading-Writing-Presenting” Group (n=49) and the third was selected as the “TeacherCentered Teaching” Group (n=48). The data was collected through the Academic Achievement Test. The results obtained from the data show that the Reading-Writing-Presenting method and Group Investigation method used in the cooperative learning model both have a positive effect on increasing students’ academic knowledge in citizenship lessons. The results of both these methods exceeded the results from the Teacher-Centered Teaching method.
