Abstract:

This study presents the results obtained from the first year of an intervention program within a three-year project. The primary objective of this project is to monitor students' higher-order thinking skills in an intervention program designed to develop these skills. While other higher-order thinking skills were also investigated in this project, this article will only present the results related to logical thinking skills. Specifically, latent growth models were used to examine changes in students' logical thinking skills during the intervention program.

The study was conducted in two cities in Türkiye during the 2024/2025 academic year. Five middle schools in these cities with average levels of success in past exams were selected. The intervention program has been implemented in grades 5 and 6 in these schools during the 2024/2025 academic year. Experimental and control groups were formed in these schools to test the effectiveness of the intervention program. In the 5th grade, 140 students were in the experimental and 92 students were in the control group. On the other hand, 97 students were in the experimental and 142 students were in the control group in the 6th grade. The learning activities and student worksheets aimed at developing students’ logical thinking skills to be applied to the experimental group at the 5th and 6th grade levels were developed by a nine-person project team as a result of approximately two online workshops held each month during the 2023/2024 academic year. Each logical thinking activity lasted at least one lesson hour. A total of 14 activities were carried out for each grade-level throughout the academic year.

The findings presented in this paper are from the first year of a two-year intervention program and were obtained from analyses of students’ responses to only one of the three quantitative measurement tools used in the study. This instrument was administered to students three times during the 2024/2025 academic year, in September, December, and May.

The measurement tool administered to students is a valid and reliable measurement tool used to measure the logical thinking skills of middle school students. This instrument contains 16 multiple-choice questions and two open-ended questions. The multiple-choice questions were coded as true or false, while the open-ended questions were coded as 1 point if the answer contained all possible combinations of the combinatiorial reasoning tasks and 0 point in other cases. The scores obtained by the students from the three measurement applications were analyzed using latent growth models.

According to the results of the conditional latent growth model analyses applied for 5th and 6th grades, students' logical thinking skills increased significantly over the three measurement applications in both grade levels. However, the conditional latent growth model analysis results did not show a significant difference between the experimental and control groups in either grade level. Since both experimental group and control groups increased their logical thinking skills and no difference was found between these groups’ development, it can be said that one year long intervention program may not enough to see the effect this program. It is expected to this effect from the results obtained in the second year of the intervention program.

Keywords:

Logical thinking, intervention, science education.