Örnek olay tabanlı öğrenme yönteminin 11. sınıf öğrencilerinin asitler ve bazlar konusundaki kavramsal anlamalarına ve kimya dersini öğrenmeye yönelik motivasyonları üzerine etkisi.

In the last semi centennial, researches showed that constructivist learning methods are the most effective when it comes to students’ conceptual understanding and motivation, because of their activation of students’ prior knowledge that leads to meaningful learning. Thus, in this dissertation, the main purpose is to explore the effects of case-based learning, which is a type of constructivist learning method, on students’ understanding of acids and bases concepts and their motivation to learn chemistry when compared to traditionally designed teaching method on 11th grade students. 292 eleventh grade students from a total of eight classes of a chemistry course from two different school types in two different cities of Turkey in 2013-2014 spring semesters were enrolled in the study. The classes were randomly assigned as experimental and control group. Experimental group students were instructed by case-based learning method in which specific situations from real life were discussed whereas control group students were instructed by traditional method. The data were collected by the adapted version of Science Motivation Questionnaire (SMQ) that was restricted to chemistry and translated into Turkish by Çetin-Dindar and Geban (2010) and Acids and Bases Test (ABT) developed by the researcher. At the beginning of the implementation, in order to evaluate students’ prior knowledge and their motivation to learn chemistry the instruments ABT and CMQ were administered as pre-tests to both control and experimental groups. Throughout the eight weeks during the implementation, case based learning (CBL) instruction was used in the experimental group and the traditionally designed instruction was used in the control group. After the implementation, the instruments CMQ and ABT were again administered to both groups as post-tests to evaluate students’ understanding on acids and bases concepts and their motivation to learn chemistry. Afterwards, the collected data were analyzed descriptively and inferentially. The results of the study showed that case based learning instruction results in higher understanding of acids and bases concepts than the traditionally designed instruction method. Also, there was a significant difference between both groups in the favor of experimental group with respect to students’ motivation to learn chemistry. Moreover, the result of this study also proved students to have misconceptions related to acids and bases concepts and some new misconceptions were also introduced to the literature. Furthermore, case base learning (CBL) instruction was found to be effective on overcoming these misconceptions when compared to traditionally designed instruction method.Ph.D. - Doctoral Progra