This study aimed to investigate the changes of academic achievement and science-related attitude according to science unit summary type. For this, the study analyzed students' cognitive types and multiple intellectual characteristics, and let students...
This study aimed to investigate the changes of academic achievement and science-related attitude according to science unit summary type. For this, the study analyzed students' cognitive types and multiple intellectual characteristics, and let students freely summarize science units using visual methods on a sketchbook after each lesson for four science units. Based on the analysis of students' outcomes, the study examined their effect on learning and change in academic achievement according to unit summary type and science-related attitude based on gender, cognitive type and multiple intelligence.
The results are as follows.
First, regarding the effect on learning shown in students' unit summary outcomes, it was found that students most preferred pictures followed by writing and comic pictures among unit summary methods. In the most of units, they clearly expressed concepts to learn and included a lot of contents about science investigation but not much of contents about scientific attitude. Through mostly described and explained experiment equipment and reagents, the study found the most popular topics and experiment equipment among students. In addition, the significance of experiment lessons was proven by the effect of experimental experience on outcomes. Most of experimental group students showed as high reflection level of experimental experience in each unit as respectively 97%, 94%, 97% and 97%, which implicates the significance of experiment in school education.
Though there were a small number of misconceptions, students were given an opportunity to learn more about misconceptions by finding out the examples of misconception through unit summary activities. Meanwhile, life-related examples found in students' outcomes showed the STS-related element.
Mostly described contents in each unit revealed topics which students were interested in or considered important, which is a good reference for guidance for students in the future.
Second, regarding the change of academic achievement according to unit summary type, it was found that the academic achievement of students who used writing for their unit summary showed the most significant difference(p>.05). Regarding units, there was a significant difference in the academic achievement of physics units(p>.01), and most of students who conducted unit summary using writing, pictures and comic pictures showed improvement in academic achievement. This implicates that unit summary activities using visual methods for physics units that are full of abstract concepts are very effective.
Third, the study conducted a test by selecting 4 areas(attitude for scientific investigation, acceptance of scientific attitude, joy of science classes, interest in science) among 7 areas of TOSRA(Test of Science-Related Attitude) to examine the change of students' science-related attitude. The test found that there was a significant difference in the change of overall science-related attitude with a t-value of -4.713, and there was also a significant difference in all the sub-areas of science-related attitude change, aside from the area of "acceptance of scientific attitude.
All the changes of science-related attitude according to gender, cognitive type and multiple intelligence showed significant figures. In particularly, both genders showed a significant difference, and when cognitive types are considered, field-independent students showed a more significant difference compared to field-dependant students. Regarding multiple intelligence, students of high spatial and physical intelligence showed a significant difference in science-related attitude.
These results show that unit summary activities using visual methods have a positive effect on academic achievement in science and science-related attitude changes. Therefore, more various studies on science unit summary activities are required for students' academic achievement improvement in science and significant science-related attitude changes.