ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS’ PHYSICS SUCCESSES AND THEIR ABILITIES

Ability could be defined as “power of being able to learn something, benefit from a particular skill or knowledge teaching”. Humankind is born as having different levels of power of being able to learn or do many things. This is commonly called as “potential energy (capacity)”. The potential power is developed by being used as people get older. Therefore, people progressively become able to do more complex works in life’s different periods. In other words, people use their own capacity and become ready to learn new things as they interact with environment and engage in various learning experiences. Thus, ability is a combination of behaviors that enables us to predict which extent people can benefit from a learning process as analyzing their abilities that they have developed until a certain age.

The purpose of this study was to identify the effects of student abilities on their learning processes and to determine what kind of students in terms of their abilities were more successful during physics teaching. In this direction, 156 students who took basic physics course in Ataturk University, Faculty of Education, in Departments of Physics, Science, Computer, and Mathematics teaching were included to the research scope. “Self-assessment inventory” that was developed by Kuzgun in 1988 was used to measure students’ abilities. The letter grades and raw scores that were received by students at the end of academic year were considered to determine students’ academic successes. Students’ academic successes were consisted of two exams. First one was a midterm exam that was organized in the middle of the terms and the other was final exam that was organized at the end of the term. The questions that were used in exams were prepared by researcher and reliability of tests was found as α=0,69. Descriptive analysis and correlation test were used for data analysis. As a result, it was found that student abilities affected academic successes and students who had numerical abilities had higher levels of physics successes. It is obvious that people who are aware of their own abilities have higher level of success rates in life. Individuals love the activities that they are able to do and they enjoy engaging in them. Requesting or commanding people to work on something that they do not have particular abilities for bring both unsuccessful and unhappiness. Individuals who are aware of their own abilities are very good at using their potential powers. Therefore, these people have successes on making a discovery and breaking a record.There are many incidents that are encountered in daily life and people who use their abilities in different areas discover their own potential powers incidentally. For example, a child who engages in trade because of his father’s profession can discover his ability to run while foot-racing with his friends. If he can develop his particular ability, in other words if he can progress on his potential power, success will come afterwards.